致谢

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

当权威的“历代感谢信史”汇编成册时，整本书都可以成为一件展品。这是我们第三次共同完成关于信息时代伟大变革的各个方面。《主权个体》以《街头血案》和《大清算》的研究和分析为基础。像那些书一样，它借鉴了许多权威人士的思想，他们的工作在文本和引文中得到认可。它还建立在最近和过去十年的对话中获得的见解之上。从这个意义上说，我们可能应该重复我们对在前两本书中以关键方式帮助过我们的朋友和同伙的所有感谢。为了记录在案，我们确实这样做了。那些我们在前几本书中提到过和忽略的人，请注意。我们非常感谢你们十年来的激励和善意。我们特别感谢比尔·邦纳，他帮助我们跟上过去十年出版业的变化潮流。我们的通讯《战略投资》在全球的发行量如此之大，主要归功于他的才华。他帮助我们制定了持续的市场测试方案。但更重要的是，他是一位不可或缺的朋友和倾听者。

When the definitive “History of the Thank-You Note Through the Ages” is compiled, this whole book could well be an exhibit. It is the third we have done together on various aspects of the great transformation to the Information Age now under way. The Sovereign Individual builds upon research and analysis that went into Blood in the Streets and The Great Reckoning. Like those books, it appropriates the thoughts of many authorities whose work is credited in the texts and citations. It also builds upon insights gained in conversations, both recently and over the past decade. In that sense, we should probably repeat all of our acknowledgments to the friends and accomplices who helped us in crucial ways in our two previous books. For the record, we do. Those whom we have mentioned and overlooked in our previous books, please take note. You have our thanks, cubed, for a decade of stimulation and kindnesses. Our special thanks go to Bill Bonner, who has helped us stay abreast of the changing currents of publishing during the past decade. It is mainly his genius that accounts for the huge worldwide circulation of our newsletter, Strategic Investment. He has helped us formulate ongoing market tests of our ideas. But more to the point, he has been an indispensable friend and sounding board.

我们还要感谢 Alan Lindsay、Brian、Donald 和 Scott Lines、Robert Lloyd George、Jane Collis、Carter Beese、Andy Miller、Scott Hill、Nils Taube、Gilbert de Botton、Michael Geltner、Mark Ford、David Keating、Pete Sepp、Curtin Winsor, III、V. Harwood Bocker, III、Guillermo Cervino、Eduardo Maschwitz、Michael Reynal、Jorge Gamarci、Jackie Locke、Douglas Reid、Jose Pascar、Luis Kenny、Robert Lawrence, III、Ken Klein、Kim Saull、Jim Moloney、Mike Geltner、Lee Euler、Tom Crema、Nancy Lazar、Greg Barnhill、Becky Mangus、Nancy Oppenlander、Wayne Livingstone、Hans Kuppers、Michael Baybak、Allan Zschlag、David Hale、Lisa Eden、Mel Lieberman、Glenn Blaugh 等人的特殊友谊。罗杰·道格拉斯爵士；迈克尔·斯莫奇；吉米·罗杰斯；安布罗斯·埃文斯-普里查德；克里斯·伍德；马克费伯；罗尼·陈；威廉·F·尼克林；伦尼·史密斯；杰克·惠勒；吉姆·贝内特；戈登·塔洛克；杰伊·伯恩斯坦；加里·弗尼耶；珍妮·米切尔；朱莉娅·古斯；丽莎·杨；米娅；马克·弗雷泽；丽莎·伯纳德；丽塔·史密斯；露丝·莱昂斯；亚拉·奇克；法比安·迪莱米；蒂姆·霍斯；以及我们的家人。

We also acknowledge the special friendship of Alan Lindsay; Brian, Donald, and Scott Lines; Robert Lloyd George; Jane Collis; Carter Beese; Andy Miller; Scott Hill; Nils Taube; Gilbert de Botton; Michael Geltner; Mark Ford; David Keating; Pete Sepp; Curtin Winsor, III; V. Harwood Bocker, III; Guillermo Cervino; Eduardo Maschwitz; Michael Reynal; Jorge Gamarci; Jackie Locke; Douglas Reid; Jose Pascar; Luis Kenny; Robert Lawrence, III; Ken Klein; Kim Saull; Jim Moloney; Mike Geltner; Lee Euler; Tom Crema; Nancy Lazar; Greg Barnhill; Becky Mangus; Nancy Oppenlander; Wayne Livingstone; Hans Kuppers; Michael Baybak; Allan Zschlag; David Hale; Lisa Eden; Mel Lieberman; Glenn Blaugh; Sir Roger Douglas; Michael Smorch; Jimmie Rogers; Ambrose Evans-Pritchard; Chris Wood; Marc Faber; Ronnie Chan; William F. Nicklin; Lenny Smith; Jack Wheeler; Jim Bennett; Gordon Tullock; Jay Bernstein; Gary Vernier; Jenny Mitchel; Julia Guth; Lisa Young; Mia; Mark Frasier; Lisa Bernard; Rita Smith; Ruth Lyons; Yarah Chiekh; Fabian Dilaimy; Tim Hoese; and our families.

和以前一样，我们向那些被我们忽视的人道歉。我们很抱歉，我们欠他们的感谢被遗漏了，就像一张未付的账单被卷入了杂货店的传单中并被扔掉了。也许我们可以通过向所有未被提及的朋友发表感谢信来避免讨债公司的愤怒。我们对你们的依赖甚至比我们意识到的还要多。

As before, we apologize to those whom we have overlooked. We are sorry that the acknowledgment we owe them has fallen between the cracks, like an unpaid bill that got tangled up with the grocery circulars and tossed away. Perhaps we can avoid the wrath of the collection agency by posting a bond of thanks to all our unmentioned friends. We depend on you even more than we realize.

最后，我们要感谢那些特别参与启动这个项目的人：我们的经纪人 Theron Raines；我们的编辑 Dominick Anfuso；以及西蒙舒斯特出版社的其他优秀员工，包括 Carolyn Reidy、Cassie Jones、Ana DeBevoise 和 Cherise Grant。

Finally, we thank those who were specifically involved in launching this project: our agent, Theron Raines; our editor, Dominick Anfuso; and the other good people at Simon & Schuster, including Carolyn Reidy, Cassie Jones, Ana DeBevoise, and Cherise Grant.

致安农齐亚塔和布鲁克：

To Annunziata and Brooke,

新千年的主权个人

Sovereign Individuals in the new millennium

“未来一片混乱。自从我们站起来以来，这样的门已经开了五六次。这是活着的最好时代，几乎所有你以为你知道的事情都是错的。”

—汤姆·斯托帕德，《阿卡迪亚》

“The future is disorder. A door like this has cracked open five or six times since we got up on our hind legs. It is the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong.”

—Tom Stoppard, Arcadia

前言

PREFACE

中世纪的人对意志感到绝望。他们认为人类是受伤和软弱的。但他们尊重智慧。他们认为，即使是人类，如果我们仔细思考，也有能力回答上帝和宇宙最深奥的问题。

Medieval men despaired of the will. They thought of humans as wounded and weak. But they respected the intellect. They thought even humans, if we think carefully, have the power to answer the most profound questions of God and the Universe.

现代人崇拜意志，却对智力感到绝望。群体智慧、随机粒子的偏离、无意识偏见的影响：所有这些当代陈词滥调都是谈论智力缺陷的方式——或者说是说服我们自己的方式。

Modern men worship the will, but they despair of the intellect. The wisdom of crowds; the swerve of random particles; the influence of unconscious biases: all of these contemporary clichés are ways to talk about intellectual weakness—or ways to talk ourselves into it.

威廉·里斯-莫格勋爵和詹姆斯·戴尔·戴维森没有承诺解答有关上帝和宇宙的问题，也没有提供任何答案。但他们对“大政治”的研究——对历史上起作用的力量的剖析和对不久的将来的一系列预测——是不同寻常的，甚至是反文化的，因为它将人类理性运用到我们被教导要听天由命的事情上。

Lord William Rees-Mogg and James Dale Davidson do not promise answers about God and the Universe, nor do they supply any. But their investigation of “megapolitics”—an anatomy of the forces at work in history and a set of predictions for the near future—is unusual, or even countercultural, because it applies human reason to matters that we have been taught to leave to chance or fate.

在《主权个体》首次出版近二十五年后回顾过去，最容易做的事情，也是我们周围的文化最鼓励做的事情，就是看看他们错在哪里——几乎就像是为了让我们自己确信，仔细思考未来是没有意义的。

Looking back almost a quarter century after the first publication of The Sovereign Individual, the easiest thing to do, and the thing most encouraged by the culture around us, is to look at what they got wrong—almost as if to reassure ourselves that there was no point all along in thinking carefully about the future.

当然，他们也忽略了一些事情：首先是中国的崛起。二十一世纪，在共产党领导下的中华人民共和国创造了它自己的信息时代，具有明显的民族主义、种族同质性和深刻的国家主义特征。这可能是自本书出版以来最大的“超级政治”发展。仅举一个关键的例子，共产主义中国已经摧毁了城市国家香港——而里斯-莫格和戴维森曾将香港描述为“我们期望在信息时代蓬勃发展的司法管辖权的思维模型”。

And of course, there are some things they missed: above all, the rise of China. The twenty-first-century People’s Republic of China under the Communist Party has created its very own version of the Information Age with decidedly nationalist, ethnically homogenous, profoundly statist characteristics. This is probably the single biggest “megapolitical” development since the book came out. To cite just one key illustration, Communist China has crushed the city-state of Hong Kong—whereas Rees-Mogg and Davidson had described Hong Kong as “a mental model of the kind of jurisdiction that we expect to see flourish in the Information Age.”

一方面，这是作者的盲点。另一方面，中国政治局似乎一定是《主权个人》的热心读者。正是凭借着一种独特的长期意识，既回顾列宁和斯大林，又展望信息时代，党的领导人才在本书分析的趋势中占了上风。

On one account, this is a blind spot on the part of the authors. On another view, it can seem like China’s Politburo must have been keen readers of The Sovereign Individual. It is only through a unique long-term awareness that looks back to Lenin and Stalin as well as forward to the Information Age that the Party’s leaders prevailed amid the trends analyzed by this book.

这些趋势——赢家通吃的经济、司法竞争、大规模生产的转变以及可论证的州际战争的过时性——至今仍在发挥作用。中国的崛起与其说是对里斯-莫格和戴维森理论的驳斥，不如说是他们所描述的风险的急剧上升。

Those trends—winner-take-all economics, jurisdictional competition, the shift away from mass production, and the arguable obsolescence of interstate warfare—are still at work today. The rise of China is less a refutation of Rees-Mogg and Davidson than a dramatic raising of the stakes they described.

事实上，关于我们超级政治未来的巨大冲突才刚刚开始。在技术层面，冲突有两极：人工智能和加密。人工智能有望最终解决经济学家所说的“计算问题”：人工智能理论上可以实现对整个经济的集中控制。人工智能是中国共产党最喜欢的技术，这并非巧合。另一方面，强大的加密技术则有望实现一个去中心化和个性化的世界。如果说人工智能是共产主义的，那么加密就是自由主义的。

In truth, the great conflict over our megapolitical future is only just beginning. On the dimension of technology, the conflict has two poles: AI and crypto. Artificial Intelligence holds out the prospect of finally solving what economists call the “calculation problem”: AI could theoretically make it possible to centrally control an entire economy. It is no coincidence that AI is the favorite technology of the Communist Party of China. Strong cryptography, at the other pole, holds out the prospect of a decentralized and individualized world. If AI is communist, crypto is libertarian.

未来可能介于这两个极端之间。但我们知道，我们今天采取的行动将决定整体结果。在 2020 年阅读《主权个体》是一种仔细思考未来的方式，你的行动将有助于创造未来。这是一个不容错过的机会。

The future may lie somewhere between these two extreme poles. But we know the actions we take today will determine the overall outcome. Reading The Sovereign Individual in 2020 is a way to think carefully about the future that your own actions will help to create. It is an opportunity not to be wasted.

彼得·蒂尔

Peter Thiel

2020 年 1 月 6 日

January 6, 2020

洛杉矶

Los Angeles

第一章2000 年的转变 人类社会第四阶段

CHAPTER 1 THE TRANSITION OF THE YEAR 2000 The Fourth Stage of Human Society

“感觉好像有大事要发生：图表向我们展示了人口的年度增长、大气中二氧化碳的浓度、网络地址和每美元的兆字节数。它们都在世纪之交后飙升至一个渐近线：奇点。我们所知道的一切的终结。我们可能永远无法理解的事情的开始。” ¹

—丹尼·希利斯

“It feels like something big is about to happen: graphs show us the yearly growth of populations, atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, Net addresses, and Mbytes per dollar. They all soar up to an asymptote just beyond the turn of the century: The Singularity. The end of everything we know. The beginning of something we may never understand.”¹

—DANNY HILLIS

预感​

PREMONITIONS

2000 年的到来在过去一千年中一直萦绕在西方人的脑海中。自从公元后的第一个千年世界未能灭亡以来，神学家、福音传教士、诗人、预言家，甚至现在的计算机程序员都期待着这个十年的结束，期待着它会带来一些重大的事情。艾萨克·牛顿（Isaac Newton）这样的权威人士推测世界将在 2000 年灭亡。米歇尔·德·诺查丹玛斯（Michel de Nostradamus）的预言自 1568 年首次发表以来，每一代人都读过他的预言，他预测第三个反基督者将在 1999 年 7 月到来。2^瑞士心理学家卡尔·荣格（Carl Jung）是“集体无意识”的鉴赏家，他预见到 1997 年新时代的诞生。这样的预测很容易被嘲笑。经济学家的冷静预测也是如此，比如德意志银行证券公司的爱德华·亚德尼博士（Dr. Edward Yardeni）预计计算机在千禧年的午夜发生故障，“扰乱了整个全球经济”。3但无论你认为千年虫问题只是计算机程序员和信息技术顾问为挑起商业争端而制造^的毫无根据的歇斯底里，还是技术与预言性想象协同发展的神秘事例，都无可否认，千禧年前夕的情况激起了人们对世界走向的通常病态怀疑。

The coming of the year 2000 has haunted the Western imagination for the past thousand years. Ever since the world failed to end at the turn of the first millennium after Christ, theologians, evangelists, poets, seers, and now, even computer programmers have looked to the end of this decade with an expectation that it would bring something momentous. No less an authority than Isaac Newton speculated that the world would end with the year 2000. Michel de Nostradamus, whose prophecies have been read by every generation since they were first published in 1568, forecast the coming of the Third Antichrist in July 1999.² Swiss psychologist Carl Jung, connoisseur of the “collective unconscious,” envisioned the birth of a New Age in 1997. Such forecasts may easily be ridiculed. And so can the sober forecasts of economists, such as Dr. Edward Yardeni of Deutsche Bank Securities, who expects computer malfunctions on the millennial midnight to “disrupt the entire global economy.”³ But whether you view the Y2K computer problem as groundless hysteria ginned up by computer programmers and Information Technology consultants to stir up business, or as a mysterious instance of technology unfolding in concert with the prophetic imagination, there is no denying that circumstances at the eve of the millennium excite more than the usual morbid doubt about where the world is tending.

对未来的不安感开始影响过去 250 年来西方社会所特有的乐观主义。世界各地的人们都犹豫不决、忧心忡忡。您可以从他们的脸上看到这种感觉，从他们的谈话中听到这种感觉，从民意调查和投票箱中看到这种感觉。就像大气中离子的无形物理变化在云层变暗和闪电袭来之前就预示着雷暴即将来临一样，现在，在千禧年的黄昏时刻，空气中弥漫着变化的预兆。一个又一个的人，以自己的方式，感觉到一种垂死的生活方式的时间正在流逝。随着十年的结束，一个残酷的世纪也随之结束，而人类成就的光辉千年也随之结束。这一切都将在 2000 年结束。

A sense of disquiet about the future has begun to color the optimism so characteristic of Western societies for the past 250 years. People everywhere are hesitant and worried. You see it in their faces. Hear it in their conversation. See it reflected in polls and registered in the ballot box. Just as an invisible, physical change of ions in the atmosphere signals that a thunderstorm is imminent even before the clouds darken and lightning strikes, so now, in the twilight of the millennium, premonitions of change are in the air. One person after another, each in his own way, senses that time is running out on a dying way of life. As the decade expires, a murderous century expires with it, and also a glorious millennium of human accomplishment. All draw to a close with the year 2000.

“因为没有什么掩盖的事不会被揭露，也没有没有什么隐藏的事不会被知道。”

—马太福音10:26

“For there is nothing covered that shall not be revealed, neither hid that shall not be known.”

—MATTHEW 10:26

我们相信，西方文明的现代阶段将随之结束。本书将说明原因。像许多早期作品一样，本书试图透过黑暗的玻璃，勾勒出尚未到来的未来的模糊形状和维度。从这个意义上讲，我们的作品是启示性的——按照这个词的原意。Apokalypsis在希腊语中的意思是“揭开面纱”。我们相信，历史的新阶段——信息时代——即将被“揭开”。

We believe that the modern phase of Western civilization will end with it. This book tells why. Like many earlier works, it is an attempt to see into a glass darkly, to sketch out the vague shapes and dimensions of a future that is still to be. In that sense, we mean our work to be apocalyptic—in the original meaning of the word. Apokalypsis means “unveiling” in Greek. We believe that a new stage in history—the Information Age—is about to be “unveiled.”

“我们正在见证一个新的逻辑空间的开始，一个瞬时电子无处不在的空间，我们所有人都可以访问、进入和体验它。简而言之，我们拥有一种新型社区的开始。虚拟社区成为世俗天国的典范；正如耶稣所说，他父亲的王国里有许多豪宅，因此也有许多虚拟社区，每个社区都反映了他们自己的需求和愿望。”

—迈克尔·格拉索⁴

“We are watching the beginnings of a new logical space, an instantaneous electronic everywhereness, which we may all access, enter into, and experience. We have, in short, the beginnings of a new kind of community. The virtual community becomes the model for a secular Kingdom of Heaven; as Jesus said there were many mansions in his Father’s Kingdom, so there are many virtual communities, each reflecting their own needs and desires.”

—MICHAEL GRASSO⁴

人类社会第四阶段​​​​​​

THE FOURTH STAGE OF HUMAN SOCIETY

本书的主题是权力的新革命，它以牺牲二十世纪民族国家为代价来解放个人。以前所未有的方式改变暴力逻辑的创新正在改变未来必须存在的界限。如果我们的推论正确，那么你正站在历史上最彻底的革命的门槛上。微处理将以比现在大多数人想象的更快的速度颠覆和摧毁民族国家，在此过程中创造出新的社会组织形式。这绝非易事。

The theme of this book is the new revolution of power which is liberating individuals at the expense of the twentieth-century nation-state. Innovations that alter the logic of violence in unprecedented ways are transforming the boundaries within which the future must lie. If our deductions are correct, you stand at the threshold of the most sweeping revolution in history. Faster than all but a few now imagine, microprocessing will subvert and destroy the nation-state, creating new forms of social organization in the process. This will be far from an easy transformation.

它将带来的挑战将更加巨大，因为它将以前所未有的速度发生。纵观人类历史，从最早的开始到现在，经济生活只有三个基本阶段：（1）狩猎采集社会；（2）农业社会；（3）工业社会。现在，地平线上隐约可见一种全新的社会组织第四阶段：信息社会。

The challenge it will pose will be all the greater because it will happen with incredible speed compared with anything seen in the past. Through all of human history from its earliest beginnings until now, there have been only three basic stages of economic life: (1) hunting-and-gathering societies; (2) agricultural societies; and (3) industrial societies. Now, looming over the horizon, is something entirely new, the fourth stage of social organization: information societies.

社会发展的每个阶段都与暴力演变和控制的不同阶段相对应。正如我们详细解释的那样，信息社会有望大幅降低暴力的回报，部分原因是它们超越了地域性。小说家威廉·吉布森 (William Gibson) 称之为“双方同意的幻觉”的网络空间虚拟现实将远远超出恶霸的想象范围。在新千年，控制大规模暴力的优势将远远低于法国大革命以来的任何时候。这将产生深远的影响。其中之一就是犯罪率上升。当组织大规模暴力的回报下降时，小规模暴力的回报可能会大幅上升。暴力将变得更加随机和局部化。有组织犯罪的范围将扩大。我们将解释原因。

Each of the previous stages of society has corresponded with distinctly different phases in the evolution and control of violence. As we explain in detail, information societies promise to dramatically reduce the returns to violence, in part because they transcend locality. The virtual reality of cyberspace, what novelist William Gibson characterized as a “consensual hallucination,” will be as far beyond the reach of bullies as imagination can take it. In the new millennium, the advantage of controlling violence on a large scale will be far lower than it has been at any time since before the French Revolution. This will have profound consequences. One of these will be rising crime. When the payoff for organizing violence at a large scale tumbles, the payoff from violence at a smaller scale is likely to jump. Violence will become more random and localized. Organized crime will grow in scope. We explain why.

暴力回归率下降的另一个逻辑含义是政治的衰落，而政治是犯罪的最大舞台。有许多证据表明，人们对二十世纪民族国家的公民神话的信奉正在迅速消退。共产主义的消亡只是最引人注目的例子。正如我们详细探讨的那样，西方政府领导人的道德崩塌和腐败加剧并非偶然。它们证明民族国家的潜力已经耗尽。甚至许多领导人也不再相信他们所说的陈词滥调。其他人也不相信他们。

Another logical implication of falling returns to violence is the eclipse of politics, which is the stage for crime on the largest scale. There is much evidence that adherence to the civic myths of the twentieth-century nation-state is rapidly eroding. The death of Communism is merely the most striking example. As we explore in detail, the collapse of morality and growing corruption among leaders of Western governments are not random developments. They are evidence that the potential of the nation-state is exhausted. Even many of its leaders no longer believe the platitudes they mouth. Nor are they believed by others.

历史重演

History Repeats Itself

这种情况与过去有着惊人的相似之处。每当技术变革将旧形式与新的经济推动力分离开来时，道德标准就会发生变化，人们开始越来越鄙视那些掌管旧制度的人。这种普遍的反感往往在人们形成新的连贯的变革意识形态之前就已显现。15 世纪末的情况也是如此，当时中世纪教会是封建制度的主要机构。尽管人们普遍相信“祭司职位的神圣性”，但高级和低级神职人员都遭到极度蔑视——与当今大众对政客和官僚的态度并无二致^。5

This is a situation with striking parallels in the past. Whenever technological change has divorced the old forms from the new moving forces of the economy, moral standards shift, and people begin to treat those in command of the old institutions with growing disdain. This widespread revulsion often comes into evidence well before people develop a new coherent ideology of change. So it was in the late fifteenth century, when the medieval Church was the predominant institution of feudalism. Notwithstanding popular belief in “the sacredness of the sacerdotal office,” both the higher and lower ranks of clergy were held in the utmost contempt—not unlike the popular attitude toward politicians and bureaucrats today.⁵

我们相信，通过类比 15 世纪末的情况（当时生活已完全被有组织的宗教所渗透）和当今的情况（当今世界已充满政治），我们可以学到很多东西。15 世纪末支持制度化宗教的成本已达到历史最高水平，就像今天支持政府的成本已达到老态龙钟的水平一样。

We believe that much can be learned by analogy between the situation at the end of the fifteenth century, when life had become thoroughly saturated by organized religion, and the situation today, when the world has become saturated with politics. The costs of supporting institutionalized religion at the end of the fifteenth century had reached a historic extreme, much as the costs of supporting government have reached a senile extreme today.

我们知道火药革命后宗教组织发生了什么。技术发展产生了强烈的动机来缩减宗教机构的规模并降低其成本。类似的技术革命注定会在新千年初期彻底缩小民族国家的规模。

We know what happened to organized religion in the wake of the Gunpowder Revolution. Technological developments created strong incentives to downsize religious institutions and lower their costs. A similar technological revolution is destined to downsize radically the nation-state early in the new millennium.

“今天，经过一个多世纪的电气技术发展，我们已经将我们的中枢神经系统延伸到了全球，就我们这个星球而言，空间和时间都消失了” ⁶

—马歇尔·麦克卢汉，1964年

“Today, after more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned”⁶

—MARSHALL McLUHAN, 1964

信息革命

The Information Revolution

随着大型系统的崩溃加速，系统强制将逐渐成为影响经济生活和收入分配的因素。在社会机构的组织中，效率将变得比权力的命令更重要。这意味着，能够有效维护产权并提供司法管理，同时消耗很少资源的省份甚至城市将成为信息时代的可行主权，而在过去五个世纪中它们通常都不是这样的。一个全新的经济活动领域，不受身体暴力将出现在网络空间。最明显的好处将流向“认知精英”，他们将越来越多地在政治边界之外活动。他们已经同样熟悉法兰克福、伦敦、纽约、布宜诺斯艾利斯、洛杉矶、东京和香港。不同司法管辖区内的收入将变得更加不平等，不同司法管辖区之间的收入将变得更加平等。

As the breakdown of large systems accelerates, systematic compulsion will recede as a factor shaping economic life and the distribution of income. Efficiency will become more important than the dictates of power in the organization of social institutions. This means that provinces and even cities that can effectively uphold property rights and provide for the administration of justice, while consuming few resources, will be viable sovereignties in the Information Age, as they generally have not been during the last five centuries. An entirely new realm of economic activity that is not hostage to physical violence will emerge in cyberspace. The most obvious benefits will flow to the “cognitive elite,” who will increasingly operate outside political boundaries. They are already equally at home in Frankfurt, London, New York, Buenos Aires, Los Angeles, Tokyo, and Hong Kong. Incomes will become more unequal within jurisdictions and more equal between them.

《主权个体》探讨了这一革命性变革的社会和经济后果。我们希望帮助您利用新时代的机遇，避免被其影响所摧毁。如果我们预期的情况只有一半发生，您就会面临历史上少有的重大变化。

The Sovereign Individual explores the social and financial consequences of this revolutionary change. Our desire is to help you to take advantage of the opportunities of the new age and avoid being destroyed by its impact. If only half of what we expect to see happens, you face change of a magnitude with few precedents in history.

2000 年的变革不仅将彻底改变世界经济的性质，而且其变革速度将比以往任何阶段的变革都更快。与农业革命不同，信息革命不会花上几千年的时间才能发挥作用。与工业革命不同，它的影响不会持续几个世纪。信息革命将在人的一生中发生。

The transformation of the year 2000 will not only revolutionize the character of the world economy, it will do so more rapidly than any previous phase change. Unlike the Agricultural Revolution, the Information Revolution will not take millennia to do its work. Unlike the Industrial Revolution, its impact will not be spread over centuries. The Information Revolution will happen within a lifetime.

更重要的是，这种转变几乎会同时发生在所有地方。技术和经济创新将不再局限于地球上的一小部分地区。这种转变将几乎是普遍的。它将与过去彻底决裂，几乎将古希腊等早期农业民族所想象的诸神的魔法领域带入现实。在新千年，要保留许多当代机构将比现在大多数人愿意承认的更为困难或不可能。信息社会形成后，它们将与工业社会截然不同，就像埃斯库罗斯笔下的希腊与穴居人的世界截然不同一样。

What is more, it will happen almost everywhere at once. Technical and economic innovations will no longer be confined to small portions of the globe. The transformation will be all but universal. And it will involve a break with the past so profound that it will almost bring to life the magical domain of the gods as imagined by the early agricultural peoples like the ancient Greeks. To a greater degree than most would now be willing to concede, it will prove difficult or impossible to preserve many contemporary institutions in the new millennium. When information societies take shape they will be as different from industrial societies as the Greece of Aeschylus was from the world of the cave dwellers.

不受束缚的普罗米修斯：主权个体的崛起​​​​

PROMETHEUS UNBOUND: THE RISE OF THE SOVEREIGN INDIVIDUAL

“我所知道的最令人鼓舞的事实就是，人类通过有意识的努力，毫无疑问能够提升自己的生活。”

—亨利·戴维· T ·梭罗

“I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor.”

—HENRY DAVID THOREAU

即将到来的变革既是好消息也是坏消息。好消息是信息革命将前所未有地解放个人。那些能够自我教育和自我激励的人将首次几乎完全自由地发明自己的作品，并充分发挥其创造力的益处。自己的生产力。天才将得到释放，摆脱政府的压迫和种族偏见的束缚。在信息社会，任何真正有能力的人都不会被他人的错误观点所束缚。地球上大多数人对你的种族、你的长相、你的年龄、你的性倾向或你的发型的看法都无关紧要。在网络经济中，他们永远不会看到你。丑陋、肥胖、年老、残疾的人将在网络空间的新前沿上以完全无视肤色的匿名方式与年轻和美丽的人平等竞争。

The coming transformation is both good news and bad. The good news is that the Information Revolution will liberate individuals as never before. For the first time, those who can educate and motivate themselves will be almost entirely free to invent their own work and realize the full benefits of their own productivity. Genius will be unleashed, freed from both the oppression of government and the drags of racial and ethnic prejudice. In the Information Society, no one who is truly able will be detained by the ill-formed opinions of others. It will not matter what most of the people on earth might think of your race, your looks, your age, your sexual proclivities, or the way you wear your hair. In the cybereconomy, they will never see you. The ugly, the fat, the old, the disabled will vie with the young and beautiful on equal terms in utterly color-blind anonymity on the new frontiers of cyberspace.

创意转化为财富

Ideas Become Wealth

无论功绩来自何处，都将得到前所未有的回报。在一个财富的最大来源是你头脑中的想法而不是物质资本的环境中，任何思维清晰的人都有可能致富。信息时代将是向上流动的时代。它将为世界上从未充分分享工业社会繁荣的数十亿人提供更加平等的机会。其中最聪明、最成功和最雄心勃勃的人将成为真正的主权个体。

Merit, wherever it arises, will be rewarded as never before. In an environment where the greatest source of wealth will be the ideas you have in your head rather than physical capital alone, anyone who thinks clearly will potentially be rich. The Information Age will be the age of upward mobility. It will afford far more equal opportunity for the billions of humans in parts of the world that never shared fully in the prosperity of industrial society. The brightest, most successful and ambitious of these will emerge as truly Sovereign Individuals.

一开始，只有少数人能实现完全的财务主权。但这并不否定财务独立的优势。并非每个人都能获得同样巨大的财富，但这并不意味着致富是徒劳或毫无意义的。每出现一个亿万富翁，就会出现 25,000 个百万富翁。如果你是百万富翁而不是亿万富翁，这并不意味着你很穷。同样，在未来，衡量你财务成功的一个里程碑将不仅仅是现在你能在净资产上增加多少个零，而是你是否能以一种能让你实现完全的个人自主和独立的方式安排你的事务。你越聪明，实现财务逃逸速度所需的推动力就越小。随着政治对全球经济的引力减弱，即使是收入相当微薄的人也会一飞冲天。前所未有的财务独立将成为你或你的孩子一生中可以实现的目标。

At first, only a handful will achieve full financial sovereignty. But this does not negate the advantages of financial independence. The fact that not everyone attains an equally vast fortune does not mean that it is futile or meaningless to become rich. There are 25,000 millionaires for every billionaire. If you are a millionaire and not a billionaire, that does not make you poor. Equally, in the future, one of the milestones by which you measure your financial success will be not just now many zeroes you can add to your net worth, but whether you can structure your affairs in a way that enables you to realize full individual autonomy and independence. The more clever you are, the less propulsion you will require to achieve financial escape velocity. Persons of even quite modest means will soar, as the gravitational pull of politics on the global economy weakens. Unprecedented financial independence will be a reachable goal in your lifetime or that of your children.

在生产力达到最高水平时，这些主权个体将以与希腊神话中诸神之间的关系相呼应的方式进行竞争和互动。下一个千年难以捉摸的奥林匹斯山将在网络空间中——一个没有物理存在的领域，但它将发展出有望在新千年的第二个十年成为世界最大经济体的领域。到 2025 年，网络经济将拥有数百万参与者。其中一些人将像比尔盖茨一样富有，每人身价数百亿美元。网络贫困者可能是那些年收入不足 20 万美元的人。将没有网络福利。没有网络税，也没有网络政府。网络经济，而不是中国，很可能成为未来三十年最伟大的经济现象。

At the highest plateau of productivity, these Sovereign Individuals will compete and interact on terms that echo the relations among the gods in Greek myth. The elusive Mount Olympus of the next millennium will be in cyberspace—a realm without physical existence that will nonetheless develop what promises to be the world’s largest economy by the second decade of the new millennium. By 2025, the cybereconomy will have many millions of participants. Some of them will be as rich as Bill Gates, worth tens of billions of dollars each. The cyberpoor may be those with an income of less than $200,000 a year. There will be no cyberwelfare. No cybertaxes and no cybergovernment. The cybereconomy, rather than China, could well be the greatest economic phenomenon of the next thirty years.

好消息是，政客们将无法主宰、压制和监管这一新领域的大部分商业，就像古希腊城邦的立法者无法修剪宙斯的胡须一样。这对富人来说是个好消息。对不那么富裕的人来说更是好消息。政治强加的障碍和负担，与其说是致富的障碍，不如说是致富的障碍。暴力收益下降和权力下放的好处将为每一位精力充沛、雄心勃勃的人创造从政治消亡中获益的空间。随着企业家扩大竞争的好处，甚至政府服务的消费者也将受益。迄今为止，司法管辖区之间的竞争通常意味着通过暴力手段来执行一个主要群体的统治。因此，司法管辖区间竞争的大部分聪明才智都被引导到军事行动中。但网络经济的出现将为主权服务的提供带来新条件的竞争。管辖权的扩张意味着，执行合同和保障人身和财产安全的新方法的试验将不断增多。全球经济的很大一部分从政治控制中解放出来，将迫使我们所熟知的政府以更接近市场的方式运作。政府最终将别无选择，只能像对待客户一样对待其服务地区的民众，而不是像有组织犯罪分子对待敲诈勒索受害者那样。

The good news is that politicians will no more be able to dominate, suppress, and regulate the greater part of commerce in this new realm than the legislators of the ancient Greek city-states could have trimmed the beard of Zeus. That is good news for the rich. And even better news for the not so rich. The obstacles and burdens that politics imposes are more obstacles to becoming rich than to being rich. The benefits of declining returns to violence and devolving jurisdictions will create scope for every energetic and ambitious person to benefit from the death of politics. Even the consumers of government services will benefit as entrepreneurs extend the benefits of competition. Heretofore, competition between jurisdictions has usually meant competition by means of violence to enforce the rule of a predominant group. Consequently, much of the ingenuity of interjurisdictional competition was channeled into military endeavor. But the advent of the cybereconomy will bring competition on new terms to provision of sovereignty services. A proliferation of jurisdictions will mean proliferating experimentation in new ways of enforcing contracts and otherwise securing the safety of persons and property. The liberation of a large part of the global economy from political control will oblige whatever remains of government as we have known it to operate on more nearly market terms. Governments will ultimately have little choice but to treat populations in territories they serve more like customers, and less in the way that organized criminals treat the victims of a shakedown racket.

超越政治

Beyond Politics

神话中所描述的众神之国将成为个人的可行选择——一种远离国王和议会控制的生活。首先是几十人，然后是几百人，最终是数百万人，个人将摆脱政治的束缚。随着他们的努力，他们将改变政府的性质，缩小强制的范围，扩大私人对资源的控制范围。

What mythology described as the province of the gods will become a viable option for the individual—a life outside the reach of kings and councils. First in scores, then in hundreds, and ultimately in the millions, individuals will escape the shackles of politics. As they do, they will transform the character of governments, shrinking the realm of compulsion and widening the scope of private control over resources.

主权个体的出现将再次证明神话奇特的预言力量。早期的农业民族对自然法则知之甚少，他们想象“我们称之为超自然的力量”广泛分布。这些力量有时由人类使用，有时由“化身为人的神”使用，这些神看起来像人类，并与他们互动，就像詹姆斯·乔治·弗雷泽爵士在《金枝》中所描述的“伟大的民主” ^。7

The emergence of the sovereign individual will demonstrate yet again the strange prophetic power of myth. Conceiving little of the laws of nature, the early agricultural peoples imagined that “powers we should call supernatural” were widely distributed. These powers were sometimes employed by men, sometimes by “incarnate human gods” who looked like men and interacted with them in what Sir James George Frazer described in The Golden Bough as “a great democracy.”⁷

当古人想象宙斯的孩子们生活在他们中间时，他们受到了对魔法的深切信仰的启发。他们与其他原始人分享了农业民族对大自然充满敬畏，并迷信地认为大自然的造化是由个人意志和魔法推动的。从这个意义上说，他们对大自然和神的看法并没有什么自觉的预言性。他们远远没有预见到微技术。他们无法想象它在数千年后改变个人边际生产力方面的影响。他们当然无法预见它将如何改变权力和效率之间的平衡，从而彻底改变资产的创造和保护方式。然而，他们在编织神话时所想象的东西与你可能看到的世界产生了奇怪的共鸣。

When the ancients imagined the children of Zeus living among them they were inspired by a deep belief in magic. They shared with other primitive agricultural peoples an awe of nature, and a superstitious conviction that nature’s works were set in motion by individual volition, by magic. In that sense, there was nothing self-consciously prophetic about their view of nature and their gods. They were far from anticipating microtechnology. They could not have imagined its impact in altering the marginal productivity of individuals thousands of years later. They certainly could not have foreseen how it would shift the balance between power and efficiency and thus revolutionize the way that assets are created and protected. Yet what they imagined as they spun their myths has a strange resonance with the world you are likely to see.

另类咒骂

Alt. Abracadabra

例如，魔法咒语中的“咒语”与用于访问计算机的密码有着奇妙的相似之处。在某些方面，高速计算已经使模仿精灵的魔法成为可能。早期的“数字仆人”已经服从那些控制他们被封印在计算机中的人的命令，就像精灵被封印在魔灯中一样。信息技术的虚拟现实将扩大人类愿望的范围，使几乎任何可以想象到的事物看起来都是真实的。远程呈现将使活着的个体能够以超自然的速度跨越距离，并从远处监视事件，就像希腊人认为赫尔墨斯和阿波罗所拥有的那样。信息时代的主权个体，就像古代和原始神话中的神一样，将在适当的时候享受一种“外交豁免权”，免受大多数时代和地方困扰凡人的大多数政治困境。

The “abracadabra” of the magic invocation, for example, bears a curious similarity to the password employed to access a computer. In some respects, high-speed computation has already made it possible to mimic the magic of the genie. Early generations of “digital servants” already obey the commands of those who control the computers in which they are sealed much as genies were sealed in magic lamps. The virtual reality of information technology will widen the realm of human wishes to make almost anything that can be imagined seem real. Telepresence will give living individuals the same capacity to span distance at supernatural speed and monitor events from afar that the Greeks supposed was enjoyed by Hermes and Apollo. The Sovereign Individuals of the Information Age, like the gods of ancient and primitive myths, will in due course enjoy a kind of “diplomatic immunity” from most of the political woes that have beset mortal human beings in most times and places.

新的主权个体将像神话中的神灵一样在与普通公民相同的物理环境中运作，但在政治上处于不同的领域。主权个体掌握着更多的资源，不受多种形式的强制，将在新千年重新设计政府并重新配置经济。这种变化的全部影响几乎难以想象。

The new Sovereign Individual will operate like the gods of myth in the same physical environment as the ordinary, subject citizen, but in a separate realm politically. Commanding vastly greater resources and beyond the reach of many forms of compulsion, the Sovereign Individual will redesign governments and reconfigure economies in the new millennium. The full implications of this change are all but unimaginable.

天才与宿敌

Genius and Nemesis

对于任何热爱人类抱负和成功的人来说，信息时代都将提供丰厚的回报。这无疑是许多代人以来最好的消息。但这也是一个坏消息。个人自主权的胜利和基于功绩的真正机会均等所暗示的社会新组织将导致对功绩和个人自主权的巨大回报。这将使个人对未来负有更大的责任。工业化时期，发达国家的人口将比发达国家更早地适应工业化时期的生活。工业化时期的人口也会因此而减少，甚至可能引发严重的经济衰退，从而降低发达工业社会居民在整个二十世纪所享有的生活水平优势。在我们撰写本文时，世界人口中收入最高的 15% 的人年均人均收入为 21,000 美元。而世界其余 85% 的人年均收入仅为 1,000 美元。过去积累的巨大优势在信息时代的新条件下必将消失。

For anyone who loves human aspiration and success, the Information Age will provide a bounty. That is surely the best news in many generations. But it is bad news as well. The new organization of society implied by the triumph of individual autonomy and the true equalization of opportunity based upon merit will lead to very great rewards for merit and great individual autonomy. This will leave individuals far more responsible for themselves than they have been accustomed to being during the industrial period. It will also precipitate transition crises, including a possibly severe economic depression that will reduce the unearned advantage in living standards that has been enjoyed by residents of advanced industrial societies throughout the twentieth century. As we write, the top 15 percent of the world’s population have an average per-capita income of $21,000 annually. The remaining 85 percent of the world have an average income of just $1,000. That huge, hoarded advantage from the past is bound to dissipate under the new conditions of the Information Age.

与此同时，民族国家大规模重新分配收入的能力将崩溃。信息技术大大促进了司法管辖区之间的竞争。当技术移动化，交易在网络空间发生时（这种情况将日益普遍），政府将不再能够收取高于服务价值的费用。任何拥有便携式计算机和卫星链路的人都可以在任何地方开展几乎任何信息业务，其中包括几乎全世界数万亿美元的金融交易。

As it does, the capacity of nation-states to redistribute income on a large scale will collapse. Information technology facilitates dramatically increased competition between jurisdictions. When technology is mobile, and transactions occur in cyberspace, as they increasingly will do, governments will no longer be able to charge more for their services than they are worth to the people who pay for them. Anyone with a portable computer and a satellite link will be able to conduct almost any information business anywhere, and that includes almost the whole of the world’s multitrillion-dollar financial transactions.

这意味着你不再需要住在高税管辖区才能赚取高收入。未来，当大多数财富可以在任何地方赚取，甚至可以在任何地方消费时，试图收取过高居住费的政府只会赶走他们最好的客户。如果我们的推理是正确的，而且我们相信它是正确的，我们所知道的民族国家将不会以现在的形式存在下去。

This means that you will no longer be obliged to live in a high-tax jurisdiction in order to earn high income. In the future, when most wealth can be earned anywhere, and even spent anywhere, governments that attempt to charge too much as the price of domicile will merely drive away their best customers. If our reasoning is correct, and we believe it is, the nation-state as we know it will not endure in anything like its present form.

国家的末日​​​

THE END OF NATIONS

削弱主导机构权力的变化既令人不安又危险。正如现代早期的君主、贵族、教皇和当权者为维护其惯有特权而进行残酷斗争一样，今天的政府也会使用暴力，通常是隐蔽的和专制的，试图阻止时光倒流。由于受到技术挑战的削弱，国家将以迄今为止在与其他政府打交道时所表现出的同样冷酷和外交手段对待日益自主的个人，即其前公民。1998 年 8 月 20 日，美国向据称与流亡沙特百万富翁奥萨马·本·拉登有关的目标发射了价值约 2 亿美元的战斧 BGM-109 海基巡航导弹，标志着这一历史新阶段的到来。本·拉登成为历史上第一个卫星电话被巡航导弹袭击的人。与此同时，美国摧毁了苏丹喀土穆的一家制药厂以纪念本·拉登。本·拉登成为美国头号敌人反映了战争性质的重大变化。一个人，尽管拥有数亿美元，现在也可以被描绘成对工业时代最强大军事力量的合理威胁。美国总统及其国家安全助理发表的言论让人想起冷战期间对苏联的宣传，将本·拉登这个普通人描绘成跨国恐怖分子和美国的主要敌人。

Changes that diminish the power of predominant institutions are both unsettling and dangerous. Just as monarchs, lords, popes, and potentates fought ruthlessly to preserve their accustomed privileges in the early stages of the modern period, so today’s governments will employ violence, often of a covert and arbitrary kind, in the attempt to hold back the clock. Weakened by the challenge from technology, the state will treat increasingly autonomous individuals, its former citizens, with the same range of ruthlessness and diplomacy it has heretofore displayed in its dealing with other governments. The advent of this new stage in history was punctuated with a bang on August 20, 1998, when the United States fired about $200 million worth of Tomahawk BGM-109 sea-launched cruise missiles at targets allegedly associated with an exiled Saudi millionaire, Osama bin Laden. Bin Laden became the first person in history to have his satellite phone targeted for attack by cruise missiles. Simultaneously, the United States destroyed a pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum, Sudan, in Bin Laden’s honor. The emergence of Bin Laden as the enemy-in-chief of the United States reflects a momentous change in the nature of warfare. A single individual, albeit one with hundreds of millions of dollars, can now be depicted as a plausible threat to the greatest military power of the Industrial era. In statements reminiscent of propaganda employed during the Cold War about the Soviet Union, the United States president and his national security aides portrayed Bin Laden, a private individual, as a transnational terrorist and leading enemy of the United States.

同样的军事逻辑使奥萨马·本·拉登被推崇为美国的主要敌人，而这种逻辑也将在政府与民众的内部关系中得到体现。政府与个人之间出现一种新型谈判方式，必然导致越来越严厉的勒索手段。技术将使个人比以往任何时候都更接近主权。而他们也将受到这种对待。有时是暴力的，作为敌人，有时是平等的谈判方，有时是盟友。但无论政府表现得多么无情，特别是在过渡时期，将国税局与中央情报局结合起来对他们来说都没有什么用。迫于压力，他们将越来越需要与自主的个人谈判，而这些个人的资源将不再那么容易被控制。

The same military logic that has seen Osama bin Laden elevated to a position as the chief enemy of the United States will assert itself in governments’ internal relations with their subjects. Increasingly harsh techniques of exaction will be a logical corollary of the emergence of a new type of bargaining between governments and individuals. Technology will make individuals more nearly sovereign than ever before. And they will be treated that way. Sometimes violently, as enemies, sometimes as equal parties in negotiation, sometimes as allies. But however ruthlessly governments behave, particularly in the transition period, wedding the IRS with the CIA will avail them little. They will be increasingly required by the press of necessity to bargain with autonomous individuals whose resources will no longer be so easily controlled.

信息革命所隐含的变化不仅会给政府带来财政危机，而且还会瓦解所有大型机构。20 世纪已有 14 个帝国消失。帝国的瓦解是民族国家本身解体过程的一部分。政府将不得不适应个人日益增长的自主权。征税能力将下降 50-70%。这将使较小的管辖区更加成功。制定有竞争力的条件来吸引有能力的个人及其资本的挑战在飞地中比在大洲之间更容易实现。

The changes implied by the Information Revolution will not only create a fiscal crisis for governments, they will tend to disintegrate all large structures. Fourteen empires have disappeared already in the twentieth century. The breakdown of empires is part of a process that will dissolve the nation-state itself. Government will have to adapt to the growing autonomy of the individual. Taxing capacity will plunge by 50-70 percent. This will tend to make smaller jurisdictions more successful. The challenge of setting competitive terms to attract able individuals and their capital will be more easily undertaken in enclaves than across continents.

我们相信，随着现代民族国家的瓦解，现代野蛮人将越来越多地在幕后行使权力。俄罗斯黑手党（他们挑剔前苏联的罪名）、其他种族犯罪团伙、权贵阶层、毒枭和叛变的秘密机构等团体^将自行立法。他们已经这样做了。现代野蛮人已经渗透到民族国家的形式中，但并没有对其外表进行太大改变，这远远超出了人们的普遍理解。他们是寄生在一个垂死体系上的微型寄生虫。这些团体与处于战争状态的国家一样暴力和肆无忌惮，但他们在较小规模上采用了国家的手段。他们日益增长的影响力和权力是政治规模缩小的一部分。微处理技术减少了有效使用和控制暴力的群体规模。随着这场技术革命的展开，掠夺性暴力将越来越多地在中央控制之外组织起来。遏制暴力的努力也将以更依赖于效率而非权力大小的方式展开。

We believe that as the modern nation-state decomposes, latter-day barbarians will increasingly come to exercise power behind the scenes. Groups like the Russian mafiya, which picks the bones of the former Soviet Union, other ethnic criminal gangs, nomenklaturas,^I drug lords, and renegade covert agencies will be laws unto themselves. They already are. Far more than is widely understood, the modern barbarians have already infiltrated the forms of the nation-state without greatly changing its appearances. They are micro-parasites feeding on a dying system. As violent and unscrupulous as a state at war, these groups employ the techniques of the state on a smaller scale. Their growing influence and power are part of the downsizing of politics. Microprocessing reduces the size that groups must attain in order to be effective in the use and control of violence. As this technological revolution unfolds, predatory violence will be organized more and more outside of central control. Efforts to contain violence will also devolve in ways that depend more upon efficiency than magnitude of power.

逆向历史

History in Reverse

民族国家在过去五个世纪中成长的过程将因信息时代的新逻辑而发生逆转。随着国家权力分散、主权重叠，地方权力中心将重新确立。8^有组织犯罪势力的不断增长只是这一趋势的一个体现。跨国公司已经不得不将除必要工作以外的所有工作外包出去。一些企业集团，如 AT&T、Unisys 和 ITT，已将自己拆分成几家公司，以便提高盈利能力。民族国家将像一个笨重的企业集团一样分拆，但可能在金融危机迫使它分拆之前不会分拆。

The process by which the nation-state grew over the past five centuries will be put into reverse by the new logic of the Information Age. Local centers of power will reassert themselves as the state devolves into fragmented, overlapping sovereignties.⁸ The growing power of organized crime is merely one reflection of this tendency. Multinational companies are already having to subcontract all but essential work. Some conglomerates, such as AT&T, Unisys, and ITT, have split themselves into several firms in order to function more profitably. The nation-state will devolve like an unwieldy conglomerate, but probably not before it is forced to do so by financial crises.

不仅世界上的权力在发生变化，而且世界上的工作也在发生变化。这意味着企业的运作方式将不可避免地发生变化。“虚拟公司”是企业性质发生彻底转变的证据，而信息和交易成本的下降促进了这种转变。我们探讨了信息革命对解散公司和废除“好工作”的影响。在信息时代，“工作”将是一项要完成的任务，而不是你“拥有”的职位。微处理创造了超越领土界限的全新经济活动视野。这种超越边界和领土的行为可能是自亚当和夏娃在造物主的判决下离开天堂以来最具革命性的发展：“你必汗流满面才得糊口。”随着技术彻底改变了我们使用的工具，它也使我们的法律过时，重塑了我们的道德观，改变了我们的看法。本书解释了这一切是如何发生的。

Not only is power in the world changing, but the work of the world is changing as well. This means that the way business operates will inevitably change. The “virtual corporation” is evidence of a sweeping transformation in the nature of the firm, facilitated by the drop in information and transaction costs. We explore the implications of the Information Revolution for dissolving corporations and doing away with the “good job.” In the Information Age, a “job” will be a task to do, not a position you “have.” Microprocessing has created entirely new horizons of economic activity that transcend territorial boundaries. This transcendence of frontiers and territories is perhaps the most revolutionary development since Adam and Eve straggled out of paradise under the sentence of their Maker: “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread.” As technology revolutionizes the tools we use, it also antiquates our laws, reshapes our morals, and alters our perceptions. This book explains how.

微处理和快速改进的通信技术已经使个人能够选择在哪里工作。互联网或万维网上的交易可以加密，税务人员很快就几乎不可能掌握。免税资金在海外的复利速度已经远远快于仍受制于二十世纪民族国家强加的高额税负的在岸资金。千禧年后，世界上许多商业活动将迁移到网络空间的新领域，在这个领域，政府的统治权将不复存在，就像他们对海底或外行星的统治权一样。在网络空间，自古以来一直是政治的首要任务的暴力威胁将不复存在。在网络空间，弱者将不再是弱者，而是弱者。强者将平等相待。网络空间是终极的离岸管辖区。一个没有税收的经济体。天空中布满钻石的百慕大。

Microprocessing and rapidly improving communications already make it possible for the individual to choose where to work. Transactions on the Internet or the World Wide Web can be encrypted and will soon be almost impossible for tax collectors to capture. Tax-free money already compounds far faster offshore than onshore funds still subject to the high tax burden imposed by the twentieth-century nation-state. After the turn of the millennium, much of the world’s commerce will migrate into the new realm of cyberspace, a region where governments will have no more dominion than they exercise over the bottom of the sea or the outer planets. In cyberspace, the threats of physical violence that have been the alpha and omega of politics since time immemorial will vanish. In cyberspace, the meek and the mighty will meet on equal terms. Cyberspace is the ultimate offshore jurisdiction. An economy with no taxes. Bermuda in the sky with diamonds.

当这个最大的避税天堂完全开放营业时，所有资金基本上都是由其所有者自行决定的离岸资金。这将产生连锁后果。该州已经习惯于像农民对待奶牛一样对待纳税人，把它们留在田里挤奶。很快，奶牛就会长出翅膀。

When this greatest tax haven of them all is fully open for business, all funds will essentially be offshore funds at the discretion of their owner. This will have cascading consequences. The state has grown used to treating its taxpayers as a farmer treats his cows, keeping them in a field to be milked. Soon, the cows will have wings.

国家的复仇

The Revenge of Nations

就像一个愤怒的农民，国家无疑会首先采取绝望的措施，将逃跑的牛群拴住，束缚住。它会采用隐蔽甚至暴力的手段来限制人们获得解放技术。这些权宜之计即使有用，也只能暂时奏效。20 世纪的民族国家，尽管自命不凡，但随着税收收入的下降，最终会饿死。

Like an angry farmer, the state will no doubt take desperate measures at first to tether and hobble its escaping herd. It will employ covert and even violent means to restrict access to liberating technologies. Such expedients will work only temporarily, if at all. The twentieth-century nation-state, with all its pretensions, will starve to death as its tax revenues decline.

当国家发现自己无法通过增加税收来满足其承诺的支出时，它将诉诸其他更绝望的措施。其中之一就是印钞。政府已经习惯于垄断货币，可以随意贬值。这种任意的通货膨胀是所有二十世纪国家货币政策的一个显著特征。即使是战后时期最好的国家货币德国马克，从 1949 年 1 月 1 日到 1995 年 6 月底也贬值了 71%。在同一时期，美元贬值了 84%。9^这种通货膨胀与对所有持有货币的人征税具有相同的效果。正如我们稍后所探讨的那样，通货膨胀作为收入选择将在很大程度上被电子货币的出现所剥夺。新技术将使财富持有者能够绕过现代时期发行和监管货币的国家垄断。事实上，1997 年和 1998 年席卷亚洲、俄罗斯和其他新兴经济体的信贷危机证明了国家货币和国家信用评级是时代错误，不利于全球经济的平稳运行。正是主权要求一个管辖区内的所有交易都以国家货币计价，这导致中央银行家容易犯错和投机者容易攻击，从而导致一个又一个管辖区出现通货紧缩危机。在信息时代，个人将能够使用网络货币，从而宣布他们的货币独立性。当个人可以通过万维网制定自己的货币政策时，国家继续控制工业时代的印刷机就变得无关紧要了。它们对控制世界财富的重要性将被没有物理存在的数学算法所超越。在新千年，私人市场控制的电子货币将取代政府发行的法定货币。只有穷人才会成为通货膨胀和随之而来的通货紧缩的受害者，而这都是法定货币向经济注入人为杠杆的结果。

When the state finds itself unable to meet its committed expenditure by raising tax revenues, it will resort to other, more desperate measures. Among them is printing money. Governments have grown used to enjoying a monopoly over currency that they could depreciate at will. This arbitrary inflation has been a prominent feature of the monetary policy of all twentieth-century states. Even the best national currency of the postwar period, the German mark, lost 71 percent of its value from January 1, 1949, through the end of June 1995. In the same period, the U.S. dollar lost 84 percent of its value.⁹ This inflation had the same effect as a tax on all who hold the currency. As we explore later, inflation as revenue option will be largely foreclosed by the emergence of cybermoney. New technologies will allow the holders of wealth to bypass the national monopolies that have issued and regulated money in the modern period. Indeed, the credit crises that swept through Asia, Russia, and other emerging economies in 1997 and 1998 attest to the fact that national currencies and national credit ratings are anachronisms inimical to the smooth operation of the global economy. It is precisely the fact that the demands of sovereignty require all transactions within a jurisdiction to be denominated in a national currency that creates the vulnerability to mistakes by central bankers and attacks by speculators which precipitated deflationary crises in one jurisdiction after another. In the Information Age, individuals will be able to use cybercurrencies and thus declare their monetary independence. When individuals can conduct their own monetary policies over the World Wide Web it will matter less or not at all that the state continues to control the industrial-era printing presses. Their importance for controlling the world’s wealth will be transcended by mathematical algorithms that have no physical existence. In the new millennium, cybermoney controlled by private markets will supersede fiat money issued by governments. Only the poor will be victims of inflation and ensuing collapses into deflation that are consequences of the artificial leverage which fiat money injects into the economy.

由于缺乏惯常的征税和通货膨胀范围，即使是传统文明国家的政府也会变得卑鄙无耻。随着所得税无法征收，更古老、更武断的勒索手段将重新出现。政府将采取最终形式的预扣税——事实上甚至是公开的人质扣押——以防止财富流失到他们无法触及的范围之外。不幸的个人将发现自己被挑出来，以几乎中世纪的方式被勒索。提供促进个人实现自主权的服务的企业将受到渗透、破坏和破坏。在美国，任意没收财产已经司空见惯，每周发生五千次，这将变得更加普遍。政府将侵犯人权、审查信息的自由流动、破坏有用的技术，甚至更糟。出于与已故的苏联徒劳地试图抑制个人电脑和复印机的使用同样的原因，西方政府也将寻求采用极权手段抑制网络经济。

Lacking their accustomed scope to tax and inflate, governments, even in traditionally civil countries, will turn nasty. As income tax becomes uncollectible, older and more arbitrary methods of exaction will resurface. The ultimate form of withholding tax—de facto or even overt hostage-taking— will be introduced by governments desperate to prevent wealth from escaping beyond their reach. Unlucky individuals will find themselves singled out and held to ransom in an almost medieval fashion. Businesses that offer services that facilitate the realization of autonomy by individuals will be subject to infiltration, sabotage, and disruption. Arbitrary forfeiture of property, already commonplace in the United States, where it occurs five thousand times a week, will become even more pervasive. Governments will violate human rights, censor the free flow of information, sabotage useful technologies, and worse. For the same reasons that the late, departed Soviet Union tried in vain to suppress access to personal computers and Xerox machines, Western governments will seek to suppress the cybereconomy by totalitarian means.

卢德派的回归

RETURN OF THE LUDDITES

这种方法可能会在某些人群中流行。对于许多害怕转型危机、不指望在新的社会结构中成为赢家的人来说，个人解放和自主的好消息似乎是坏消息。马来西亚总理马哈蒂尔·穆罕默德在 1998 年亚洲金融危机后实施的严厉资本管制显然很受欢迎，这证明了许多人对民族国家主导的老式封闭经济仍有热情。这种对过去的怀念将因不可避免的转型危机而激起的不满而加剧。最大的不满可能集中在目前富裕国家的中产阶级身上。他们尤其会觉得信息技术对他们的生活方式构成了威胁。有组织的强制的受益者，包括数百万接受政府重新分配收入的人，可能会对主权个人实现的新自由感到不满。他们的不满将说明“你站在哪里取决于你坐在哪里”这一真理。

Such methods may prove popular among some population segments. The good news about individual liberation and autonomy will seem to be bad news to many who are frightened by the transition crisis and do not expect to be winners in the new configuration of society. The apparent popularity of the draconian capital controls imposed in 1998 by Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamad in the wake of the Asian meltdown testifies to residual enthusiasm among many for the old-fashioned closed economy dominated by the nation-state. This nostalgia for the past will be fed by resentments inflamed by the inevitable transition crisis. The greatest resentment is likely to be centered among those of middle talent in currently rich countries. They particularly may come to feel that information technology poses a threat to their way of life. The beneficiaries of organized compulsion, including millions receiving income redistributed by governments, may resent the new freedom realized by Sovereign Individuals. Their upset will illustrate the truism that “where you stand is determined by where you sit.”

“有时我会想，我怎么会因为几个我不认识的人的命运而感到如此痛苦，他们在几百英里外的棒球场上和另一群陌生人比赛。答案很简单。我爱我的球队。虽然有风险，但关心是值得的。体育让我热血沸腾，让我兴奋，让我心跳加速。我喜欢有赌注的感觉。比赛让生活更加生动。”

—克莱格·兰伯特

“Sometimes I wondered how I could experience such deep misery over the fate of a handful of men I did not know, playing a game against another group of strangers in a ballpark hundreds of miles away. The answer is simple. I loved my teams. Although risky, caring was worth its price. Sports fired up my blood, excited me, made my heart pound. I liked having something at stake. Life was more vivid during a contest.”

—CRAIG LAMBERT

然而，将即将到来的转型危机中产生的所有不良情绪都归咎于赤裸裸的以牺牲他人为代价生活的欲望，这是一种误导。这其中涉及的因素还会更多。人类社会的本质表明，即将到来的卢德主义反应必然存在被误导的道德层面。可以把它想象成一种赤裸裸的欲望，并戴上道德假发。我们来探讨转型危机的道德和道德层面。自以为是的愤怒远不能激发人们的行动。虽然对二十世纪公民神话的信奉正在迅速消失，但它们并非没有真正的信徒。正如克雷格·兰伯特所引用的段落所证明的那样，许多人都是归属感强的人，他们重视成为某个群体的成员。有组织体育迷的认同感需求也使一些国家成为支持者。每一个在二十世纪成年的人都被灌输了二十世纪公民的责任和义务。工业社会残留的道德要求至少会刺激一些新卢德分子对信息技术的攻击。

It would be misleading, however, to attribute all the bad feelings that will be generated in the coming transition crisis to the bald desire to live at someone else’s expense. More will be involved. The very character of human society suggests that there is bound to be a misguided moral dimension to the coming Luddite reaction. Think of it as a bald desire fitted with a moral toupee. We explore the moral and moralistic dimensions of the transition crisis. Self-interested grasping of a conscious kind has far less power to motivate actions than does self-righteous fury. While adherence to the civic myths of the twentieth century is rapidly falling away, they are not without their true believers. Many humans, as the passage quoted from Craig Lambert attests, are belongers, who place importance on being members of a group. The same need to identify that motivates fans of organized sports makes some partisans of nations. Everyone who came of age in the twentieth century has been inculcated in the duties and obligations of the twentieth-century citizen. The residual moral imperatives from industrial society will stimulate at least some neo-Luddite attacks on information technologies.

从这个意义上说，即将到来的暴力至少部分地是我们所说的“道德时代错误”的表现，即将一个经济生活阶段的道德约束应用到另一个经济生活的环境中。社会的每个阶段都需要自己的道德规则来帮助个人克服他们在特定生活方式中面临的选择所特有的激励陷阱。正如一个农业社会不能按照迁徙的爱斯基摩人群体的道德规则生活一样，信息社会也无法满足为促进一个好战的二十世纪工业国家的成功而出现的道德要求。我们来解释一下原因。

In this sense, this violence to come will be at least partially an expression of what we call “moral anachronism,” the application of moral strictures drawn from one stage of economic life to the circumstances of another. Every stage of society requires its own moral rules to help individuals overcome incentive traps peculiar to the choices they face in that particular way of life. Just as a farming society could not live by the moral rules of a migratory Eskimo band, so the Information Society cannot satisfy moral imperatives that emerged to facilitate the success of a militant twentieth-century industrial state. We explain why.

未来几年，西方核心国家将出现道德不合时宜的现象，就像过去五个世纪边缘国家所经历的那样。西方殖民者和军事远征在遇到土著狩猎采集群体以及社会仍以农耕为组织的民族时，引发了此类危机。新技术引入不合时宜的环境造成了混乱和道德危机。基督教传教士成功使数百万土著民族皈依基督教，在很大程度上可以归因于外部新权力安排的突然引入导致的局部危机。从 16 世纪到 20 世纪初期，这种冲突一再发生。我们预计，随着信息社会取代按工业路线组织的社会，新千年初期也会出现类似的冲突。

In the next few years, moral anachronism will be in evidence at the core countries of the West in much the way that it has been witnessed at the periphery over the past five centuries. Western colonists and military expeditions stimulated such crises when they encountered indigenous hunting-and-gathering bands, as well as peoples whose societies were still organized for farming. The introduction of new technologies into anachronistic settings caused confusion and moral crises. The success of Christian missionaries in converting millions of indigenous peoples can be laid in large measure to the local crises caused by the sudden introduction of new power arrangements from the outside. Such encounters recurred over and over, from the sixteenth century through the early decades of the twentieth century. We expect similar clashes early in the new millennium as Information Societies supplant those organized along industrial lines.

怀旧之情

The Nostalgia for Compulsion

信息社会的兴起不会完全被看作是一个充满希望的历史新阶段，即使是那些从中受益最多的人也不会。每个人都会感到一些疑虑。许多人会鄙视破坏领土民族国家的创新。人类天性使然，任何形式的激进变革几乎总是被视为急剧恶化。五百年前，聚集在勃艮第公爵周围的朝臣会说，正在展开的破坏封建制度的创新是邪恶的。他们认为，就在后来的历史学家看到文艺复兴时期人类潜力爆发的时候，世界正在迅速走下坡路。同样，从下一个千年的角度来看，有朝一日可能被视为新的文艺复兴的东西，在疲惫的二十世纪人看来将是可怕的。

The rise of the Information Society will not be wholly welcomed as a promising new phase of history, even among those who benefit from it most. Everyone will feel some misgivings. And many will despise innovations that undermine the territorial nation-state. It is a fact of human nature that radical change of any kind is almost always seen as a dramatic turn for the worse. Five hundred years ago, the courtiers gathered around the duke of Burgundy would have said that unfolding innovations that undermined feudalism were evil. They thought the world was rapidly spiraling downhill at the very time that later historians saw an explosion of human potential in the Renaissance. Likewise, what may someday be seen as a new Renaissance from the perspective of the next millennium will look frightening to tired twentieth-century eyes.

很有可能，一些对新方式感到反感的人以及许多因新方式而处于不利地位的人会做出不愉快的反应。他们对强制的怀念可能会演变成暴力。与这些新的“卢德分子”的接触将使向激进的新社会组织形式的过渡至少对每个人来说都是一个坏消息。准备好躲避吧。由于变化的速度超出了许多世代人的道德和经济适应能力，你可以预见到对信息革命的激烈和愤慨的抵制，尽管它有解放未来的伟大承诺。

There is a high probability that some who are offended by the new ways, as well as many who are disadvantaged by them, will react unpleasantly. Their nostalgia for compulsion will probably turn violent. Encounters with these new “Luddites” will make the transition to radical new forms of social organization at least a measure of bad news for everyone. Get ready to duck. With the speed of change outracing the moral and economic capacity of many in living generations to adapt, you can expect to see a fierce and indignant resistance to the Information Revolution, notwithstanding its great promise to liberate the future.

你必须理解并准备应对这种不愉快的事情。一系列转型危机即将来临。随着工业时代遗留下来的过时的国内和国际机构不足以应对新的、分散的跨国经济的挑战，通货紧缩的灾难，如 1997 年和 1998 年席卷远东、俄罗斯和其他新兴经济体的亚洲金融危机，将不时爆发。自哥伦布航行以来，新的信息和通信技术对现代国家的颠覆性比任何对其主导地位的政治威胁都更大。这一点很重要，因为当权者很少对破坏其权威的事态发展做出和平反应。他们现在不太可能这样做。

You must understand and prepare for such unpleasantness. A series of transition crises lies ahead. Deflationary tribulations, such as the Asian contagion that swept through the Far East to Russia and other emerging economies in 1997 and 1998, will erupt sporadically as the dated national and international institutions left over from the Industrial Era prove inadequate to the challenges of the new, dispersed, transnational economy. The new information and communication technologies are more subversive of the modern state than any political threat to its predominance since Columbus sailed. This is important because those in power have seldom reacted peacefully to developments that undermined their authority. They are not likely to now.

新旧事物的碰撞将决定新千年的初期。我们预计这将是一个危险重重、回报丰厚的时代。在某些领域，文明程度大大下降，而在其他领域，文明程度则空前扩大。日益自主的个人和破产、绝望的政府将跨越新的鸿沟相互对抗。我们预计，在过渡期结束之前，主权性质将发生彻底的重组，政治将几乎消亡。与国家主宰和控制资源不同，你注定会看到政府现在提供的几乎所有服务都私有化。出于我们在本书中探讨的不可避免的原因，信息技术将破坏国家收取高于你和其他付费用户所支付服务价值的费用的能力。

The clash between the new and the old will shape the early years of the new millennium. We expect it to be a time of great danger and great reward, and a time of much diminished civility in some realms and unprecedented scope in others. Increasingly autonomous individuals and bankrupt, desperate governments will confront one another across a new divide. We expect to see a radical restructuring of the nature of sovereignty and the virtual death of politics before the transition is over. Instead of state domination and control of resources, you are destined to see the privatization of almost all services governments now provide. For inescapable reasons that we explore in this book, information technology will destroy the capacity of the state to charge more for its services than they are worth to you and other people who pay for them.

“政府必须处理好主权的问题。”

—朗讯科技首席技术官罗伯特·马丁​

“Governments will have to deal with what sovereignty means.”

—ROBERT MARTIN, CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER, LUCENT TECHNOLOGIES

通过市场实现主权

Sovereignty Through Markets

十年前很少有人能想象，个人将通过市场机制获得对领土民族国家的日益自主。所有民族国家都面临破产和权威迅速衰落。尽管它们强大，但它们保留的权力是毁灭的权力，而不是指挥的权力。它们的洲际导弹和航空母舰已经是文物，就像封建主义的最后一匹战马一样威风凛凛，却毫无用处。

To an extent that few would have imagined only a decade ago, individuals will achieve increasing autonomy over territorial nation-states through market mechanisms. All nation-states face bankruptcy and the rapid erosion of their authority. Mighty as they are, the power they retain is the power to obliterate, not to command. Their intercontinental missiles and aircraft carriers are already artifacts, as imposing and useless as the last warhorse of feudalism.

信息技术通过改变资产的创造和保护方式，使市场急剧扩张成为可能。这是革命性的。事实上，它对工业社会的革命性要比火药的出现对封建农业的革命性更大。2000 年的转变意味着主权的商业化和政治的消亡，就像枪支意味着基于誓言的封建主义的消亡一样。公民身份将走骑士精神的道路。

Information technology makes possible a dramatic extension of markets by altering the way that assets are created and protected. This is revolutionary. Indeed, it promises to be more revolutionary for industrial society than the advent of gunpowder proved to be for feudal agriculture. The transformation of the year 2000 implies the commercialization of sovereignty and the death of politics, no less than guns implied the demise of oath-based feudalism. Citizenship will go the way of chivalry.

我们相信，个人经济主权时代即将到来。正如曾经“国有化”的钢铁厂、电话公司、矿山和铁路在世界各地迅速私有化一样，你很快就会看到私有化的终极形式——个人的全面非国有化。新千年的主权个人将不再是国家的资产，不再是国库资产负债表上的一项。在 2000 年的过渡期之后，非国有化的公民将不再是我们所知的公民，而是客户。

We believe that the age of individual economic sovereignty is coming. Just as steel mills, telephone companies, mines, and railways that were once “nationalized” have been rapidly privatized throughout the world, you will soon see the ultimate form of privatization—the sweeping denationalization of the individual. The Sovereign Individual of the new millennium will no longer be an asset of the state, a de facto item on the treasury’s balance sheet. After the transition of the year 2000, denationalized citizens will no longer be citizens as we know them, but customers.

带宽超越边境命令​​

BANDWIDTH TRUMPS BORDERS

主权的商业化将使民族国家公民身份的条款和条件变得过时，就像封建制度崩溃后骑士的誓言一样。21 世纪的主权个人不再像一个需要纳税的公民那样与强大的国家建立联系，而是成为在“新的逻辑空间”中运作的政府的客户。他们将根据合同为他们需要的任何最小政府进行讨价还价，并为此付费。信息时代的政府将按照与过去几个世纪世界所期望的不同的原则组织起来。一些管辖区和主权服务将通过“选择性匹配”形成，在这个系统中，亲和力（包括商业亲和力）是虚拟管辖区赢得效忠的基础。在极少数情况下，新的主权可能是中世纪组织的遗留，例如拥有 900 年历史的耶路撒冷圣约翰、罗得岛和马耳他主权军事医院骑士团。该教团通常被称为马耳他骑士团，是一个富有的天主教徒的亲和团体，目前有 10,000 名成员，年收入达数十亿美元。马耳他骑士团发行自己的护照、邮​​票和货币，并与 70 个国家保持全面外交关系。在我们撰写本文时，它正在与马耳他共和国谈判，以重新夺回圣安杰洛堡的所有权。占领这座城堡将使骑士团获得领土权这一缺失要素，从而被承认为主权国家。马耳他骑士团可以再次成为一个主权微型国家，并立即通过悠久的历史获得合法性。 1565 年，马耳他骑士团从圣安杰洛堡击退了土耳其人的进攻，发起了马耳他大围攻。事实上，此后他们统治了马耳他多年，直到 1798 年被拿破仑驱逐。如果马耳他骑士团在未来几年内卷土重来，那么就没有比这更明显的证据证明，法国大革命后开启的现代民族国家体系只不过是历史长河中的一个插曲，在这段历史中，多种主权同时存在已成为常态。

The commercialization of sovereignty will make the terms and conditions of citizenship in the nation-state as dated as chivalric oaths seemed after the collapse of feudalism. Instead of relating to a powerful state as citizens to be taxed, the Sovereign Individuals of the twenty-first century will be customers of governments operating from a “new logical space.” They will bargain for whatever minimal government they need and pay for it according to contract. The governments of the Information Age will be organized along different principles than those which the world has come to expect over the past several centuries. Some jurisdictions and sovereignty services will be formed through “assortive matching,” a system by which affinities, including commercial affinities, are the basis upon which virtual jurisdictions earn allegiance. In rare cases, the new sovereignties may be holdovers of medieval organizations, like the 900-year-old Sovereign Military Hospitaller Order of St. John of Jerusalem, of Rhodes and of Malta. More commonly known as the Knights of Malta, the order is an affinity group for rich Catholics, with 10,000 current members and an annual income of several billions. The Knights of Malta issues its own passports, stamps, and money, and carries on full diplomatic relations with seventy countries. As we write it is negotiating with the Republic of Malta to reassume possession of Fort St. Angelo. Taking possession of the castle would give the Knights the missing ingredient of territoriality that will enable it to be recognized as a sovereignty. The Knights of Malta could once again become a sovereign microstate, instantly legitimized by a long history. It was from Fort St. Angelo that the Knights of Malta turned back the Turks in the Great Siege of 1565. Indeed, they ruled Malta for many years thereafter, until they were expelled by Napoleon in 1798. If the Knights of Malta were to return in the next few years, there could be no clearer evidence that the modern nation-state system, ushered in after the French Revolution, was merely an interlude in the longer sweep of history in which it has been the norm for many kinds of sovereignties to exist at the same time.

另一种基于匹配的后现代主权模式是铱星卫星电话网络。乍一看，你可能觉得把蜂窝电话服务视为一种主权很奇怪。然而，铱星已经被国际当局承认为一种虚拟主权。正如你所知，铱星是一种全球蜂窝电话服务，允许用户在地球上任何地方（从新西兰的费瑟斯顿到玻利维亚的查科）用一个号码接听电话。考虑到全球卫星电话网络的架构，允许呼叫路由到全球任何地方的铱星用户电信运营商必须同意将铱星视为一个虚拟国家，并拥有自己的国家代码：8816。从逻辑上讲，从一个由卫星电话用户组成的虚拟国家到在万维网上建立更具凝聚力的、跨越国界的虚拟社区的主权只有一步之遥。带宽，即通信介质的承载能力，自晶体管发明以来，其扩张速度一直快于计算能力的倍增。如果这种带宽越来越大的趋势继续下去（我们认为很可能如此），那么只需几年时间，即在千禧年后不久，带宽就会变得足够大，从而在技术上实现“元宇宙”，即科幻小说家尼尔·斯蒂芬森想象中的另类网络世界。斯蒂芬森的“元宇宙”是一个拥有自己法律的密集虚拟社区。我们认为，随着网络经济变得更加富裕，其参与者将不可避免地寻求并获得民族国家过时法律的豁免。新的网络社区至少会像耶路撒冷圣约翰、罗得岛和马耳他的主权军事医院骑士团一样富有，也更有能力推进自己的利益。事实上，由于拥有广泛的通信和信息战能力，他们将更有能力维护自己的权利。我们还探讨了其他分散主权的模式，在这些模式中，小团体可以有效地租用弱小民族国家的主权，并经营自己的经济避风港，就像今天自由港和自由贸易区被授权做的那样。

Still another and very different model for a postmodern sovereignty based on assortive matching is the Iridium satellite telephone network. At first glance, you may think it odd to treat a cellular telephone service as a kind of sovereignty. Yet Iridium has already received recognition as a virtual sovereignty by international authorities. As you may know, Iridium is a global cellular phone service that allows subscribers to receive calls on a single number, wherever they find themselves on the planet, from Featherston, New Zealand, to the Bolivian Chaco. To allow calls to be routed to Iridium subscribers anywhere on the globe, given the architecture of global telecoms, international telecom authorities had to agree to recognize Iridium as a virtual country, with its own country code: 8816. It is a short step logically from a virtual country comprising satellite telephone subscribers to sovereignty for more coherent virtual communities on the World Wide Web that span borders. Bandwidth, or the carrying capacity of a communications medium, has been expanding faster than computational capacity multiplied after the invention of transistors. If this trend to greater bandwidth continues, as we believe likely, it is only a matter of a few years, soon after the turn of the millennium, until bandwidth becomes sufficiently capacious to make technically possible the “metaverse,” the alternative, cyberspace world imagined by the science fiction novelist Neal Stephenson. Stephenson’s “metaverse” is a dense virtual community with its own laws. We believe it is inevitable that, as the cybereconomy becomes richer, its participants will seek and obtain exemption from the anachronistic laws of nation-states. The new cybercommunities will be at least as wealthy and competent at advancing their interests as the Sovereign Military Hospitaller Order of St. John of Jerusalem, of Rhodes and of Malta. Indeed, they will be more capable of asserting themselves because of far-reaching communications and information warfare capabilities. We explore still other models of fragmented sovereignty in which small groups can effectively lease the sovereignty of weak nation-states, and operate their own economic havens much as free ports and free trade zones are licensed to do today.

需要一种新的道德词汇来描述主权个体之间的关系以及政府的剩余部分。我们怀疑，随着这些新关系的术语逐渐为人所知，它们将冒犯许多在二十世纪民族国家成长为“公民”的人。民族的终结和“个人的非民族化”将削弱一些广为接受的观念，例如“法律面前人人平等”，这些观念所预设的权力关系很快就会过时。随着虚拟社区获得凝聚力，它们将坚持要求其成员根据自己的法律而不是他们恰好居住的原民族国家的法律承担责任。多种法律体系将再次在同一地理区域共存，就像古代和中世纪那样。

A new moral vocabulary will be required to describe the relations of Sovereign Individuals with one another and what remains of government. We suspect that as the terms of these new relations come into focus, they will offend many people who came of age as “citizens” of twentieth-century nation-states. The end of nations and the “denationalization of the individual” will deflate some warmly held notions, such as “equal protection under the law,” that presuppose power relations that are soon to be obsolete. As virtual communities gain coherence, they will insist that their members be held accountable according to their own laws, rather than those of the former nation-states in which they happen to reside. Multiple systems of law will again coexist over the same geographic area, as they did in ancient and medieval times.

正如在火药武器面前，保护身穿盔甲的骑士权力的尝试注定要失败一样，现代的民族主义和公民观念也注定要被微技术所扼杀。事实上，它们最终会变得可笑，就像十五世纪封建主义的神圣原则在十六世纪遭到嘲笑一样。二十世纪备受珍视的公民观念在 2000 年的转变之后，对新一代人来说将成为可笑的时代错误。二十一世纪的堂吉诃德将不再是一个努力恢复封建主义辉煌的游侠骑士，而是一个身着棕色西装的官僚，一个渴望公民审计的税务员。

Just as attempts to preserve the power of knights in armor were doomed to fail in the face of gunpowder weapons, so the modern notions of nationalism and citizenship are destined to be short-circuited by microtechnology. Indeed, they will eventually become comic in much the way that the sacred principles of fifteenth-century feudalism fell to ridicule in the sixteenth century. The cherished civic notions of the twentieth century will be comic anachronisms to new generations after the transformation of the year 2000. The Don Quixote of the twenty-first century will not be a knight-errant struggling to revive the glories of feudalism but a bureaucrat in a brown suit, a tax collector yearning for a citizen to audit.

复兴游行法​​​

REVIVING LAWS OF THE MARCH

我们很少将政府视为竞争实体，除非从最广泛的意义上看，因此现代人对主权范围和可能性的直觉已经萎缩。在过去，当权力方程式使团体更难以主张稳定的强制垄断时，权力往往是分散的，管辖权重叠，许多不同类型的实体行使一个或多个主权属性。名义上的霸主实际上在当地享有的权力很少，这种情况并不罕见。比民族国家弱的政府现在面临着持续的竞争，即在地方领土上实施强制垄断的能力。这种竞争导致了控制暴力和吸引效忠的适应性，而这种适应性很快就会再次出现。

We seldom think of governments as competitive entities, except in the broadest sense, so the modern intuition about the range and possibilities of sovereignty has atrophied. In the past, when the power equation made it more difficult for groups to assert a stable monopoly of coercion, power was frequently fragmented, jurisdictions overlapped, and entities of many different kinds exercised one or more of the attributes of sovereignty. Not infrequently, the nominal overlord actually enjoyed scant power on the ground. Governments weaker than the nation-states are now faced with sustained competition in their ability to impose a monopoly of coercion over a local territory. This competition gave rise to adaptations in controlling violence and attracting allegiance that will soon be new again.

当领主和国王的势力范围较弱，而一个或多个群体的领土主张在边界重叠时，经常会发生任何一方都无法决定性地统治另一方的情况。在中世纪，有许多边境或“边境”地区，主权混合在一起。这些暴力边境在欧洲边境地区持续了几十年甚至几个世纪。在爱尔兰，凯尔特人和英国人控制的地区之间有边境；在威尔士和英格兰、苏格兰和英格兰、意大利和法国、法国和西班牙、德国和中欧斯拉夫边境之间有边境；在西班牙的基督教王国和格拉纳达的伊斯兰王国之间也有边境。这些边境地区发展出了独特的制度和法律形式，我们很可能在下一个千年再次看到这种形式。由于两个当局的竞争地位，边境地区的居民很少纳税。更重要的是，他们通常可以选择遵守谁的法律，这种选择是通过“声明”和“扣押”等法律概念来行使的，这些概念现在几乎已经消失了。我们期望这些概念成为信息社会法律的突出特征。

When the reach of lords and kings was weak, and the claims of one or more groups overlapped at a frontier, it frequently happened that neither could decisively dominate the other. In the Middle Ages, there were numerous frontier or “march” regions where sovereignties blended together. These violent frontiers persisted for decades or even centuries in the border areas of Europe. There were marches between areas of Celtic and English control in Ireland; between Wales and England, Scotland and England, Italy and France, France and Spain, Germany and the Slav frontiers of Central Europe, and between the Christian kingdoms of Spain and the Islamic kingdom of Granada. Such march regions developed distinct institutional and legal forms of a kind that we are likely to see again in the next millennium. Because of the competitive position of the two authorities, residents of march regions seldom paid tax. What is more, they usually had a choice in deciding whose laws they were to obey, a choice that was exercised through such legal concepts as “avowal” and “distraint” that have now all but vanished. We expect such concepts to become a prominent feature of the law of Information Societies.

超越国籍

Transcending Nationality

在民族国家出现之前，很难准确统计出世界上存在的主权国家的数量，因为它们以复杂的方式相互重叠，而且行使权力的组织形式也多种多样。它们将再次出现这种情况。在民族国家体系中，领土之间的分界线往往被明确划分并固定为边界。在信息时代，这些分界线将再次变得模糊。在新千年，主权将再次分裂。新的实体将出现，它们将行使我们已认识到的政府的一些特征，但不是全部。

Before the nation-state, it was difficult to enumerate precisely the number of sovereignties that existed in the world because they overlapped in complex ways and many varied forms of organization exercised power. They will do so again. The dividing lines between territories tended to become clearly demarcated and fixed as borders in the nation-state system. They will become hazy again in the Information Age. In the new millennium, sovereignty will be fragmented once more. New entities will emerge exercising some but not all of the characteristics we have come to associate with governments.

其中一些新组织，如圣殿骑士团和中世纪的其他宗教军事组织，可能控制着大量财富和军事力量，但并不控制任何固定领土。它们的组织原则与国籍完全无关。中世纪在欧洲部分地区行使主权的宗教团体的成员和领导人的权威绝不源于民族认同。他们来自各个民族，自称效忠上帝，而不是效忠某个民族成员应该共同拥有的任何亲和力。

Some of these new entities, like the Knights Templar and other religious military orders of the Middle Ages, may control considerable wealth and military power without controlling any fixed territory. They will be organized on principles that bear no relation to nationality at all. Members and leaders of religious corporations that exercised sovereign authority in parts of Europe in the Middle Ages in no sense derived their authority from national identity. They were of all ethnic backgrounds and professed to owe their allegiance to God, and not to any affinities that members of a nationality are supposed to share in common.

网络空间的商业共和国

Merchant Republics of Cyberspace

你还将看到商人和富人组成的半主权组织重新出现，就像中世纪的汉萨同盟（商人联盟）。汉萨同盟最初在法国和佛兰芒集市上活动，后来逐渐发展到涵盖六十个城市的商人。10 ^“汉萨同盟”在英语中被重复地称为“同盟”（直译为“同盟”），是一个日耳曼商人行会组织，为成员提供保护并协商贸易条约。它在许多北欧和波罗的海城市行使半主权权力。在新千年，这些实体将取代垂死的民族国家，提供保护并帮助在不安全的世界中执行合同。

You will also see the re-emergence of associations of merchants and wealthy individuals with semisovereign powers, like the Hanse (confederation of merchants) in the Middle Ages. The Hanse that operated in the French and Flemish fairs grew to encompass the merchants of sixty cities.¹⁰ The “Hanseatic League,” as it is redundantly known in English (the literal translation is “Leaguely League”), was an organization of Germanic merchant guilds that provided protection to members and negotiated trade treaties. It came to exercise semisovereign powers in a number of Northern European and Baltic cities. Such entities will re-emerge in place of the dying nation-state in the new millennium, providing protection and helping to enforce contracts in an unsafe world.

简言之，未来很可能会令那些深陷二十世纪工业社会公民神话的人的期望落空。其中包括社会民主的幻想，这种幻想曾让最有天赋的人激动不已，并激励他们。他们预设社会会按照政府希望的方式发展——最好是根据民意调查和严格计算的选票。但事实并非如此，五十年前人们认为这是真的。现在，它已经过时了，就像生锈的烟囱一样，是工业主义的产物。公民神话不仅反映了一种认为社会问题可以通过工程解决的心态，还反映了一种错误的信心，即资源和个人在未来仍然会像二十世纪一样容易受到政治压力的影响。我们对此表示怀疑。市场力量，而不是政治多数，将迫使社会以公众舆论既不理解也不欢迎的方式进行自我重组。如果他们这样做，那么“历史就是人们希望它成为的样子”这一天真观点将被证明是极其误导的。

In short, the future is likely to confound the expectations of those who have absorbed the civic myths of twentieth-century industrial society. Among them are the illusions of social democracy that once thrilled and motivated the most gifted minds. They presuppose that societies evolve in whatever way governments wish them to—preferably in response to opinion polls and scrupulously counted votes. This was never as true as it seemed fifty years ago. Now it is an anachronism, as much an artifact of industrialism as a rusting smokestack. The civic myths reflect not only a mindset that sees society’s problems as susceptible to engineering solutions; they also reflect a false confidence that resources and individuals will remain as vulnerable to political compulsion in the future as they have been in the twentieth century. We doubt it. Market forces, not political majorities, will compel societies to reconfigure themselves in ways that public opinion will neither comprehend nor welcome. As they do, the naïve view that history is what people wish it to be will prove wildly misleading.

因此，重新审视世界至关重要。这意味着从外部重新分析你可能认为理所当然的许多事情。这将使你获得新的理解。如果你在传统思维盛行的时候未能超越传统思维，脱离现实，那么你更有可能成为未来迷失方向的牺牲品。迷失方向会滋生错误，这些错误可能会威胁到你的生意、你的投资和你的生活方式。

It will therefore be crucial that you see the world anew. That means looking from the outside in to reanalyze much that you have probably taken for granted. This will enable you to come to a new understanding. If you fail to transcend conventional thinking at a time when conventional thinking is losing touch with reality, then you will be more likely to fall prey to an epidemic of disorientation that lies ahead. Disorientation breeds mistakes that could threaten your business, your investments, and your way of life.

“宇宙会因我们理解它而奖励我们，因我们不理解它而惩罚我们。当我们理解宇宙时，我们的计划就会奏效，我们也会感觉良好。相反，如果我们试图通过跳下悬崖并挥动手臂来飞翔，宇宙就会杀死我们。” ¹¹

—杰克·科恩和伊恩·斯图尔特

“The universe rewards us for understanding it and punishes us for not understanding it. When we understand the universe, our plans work and we feel good. Conversely, if we try to fly by jumping off a cliff and flapping our arms the universe will kill us.”¹¹

—JACK COHEN AND IAN STEWART

重新认识

Seeing Anew

要想为即将到来的世界做好准备，你必须明白为什么它会与大多数专家所说的不同。这就需要仔细研究变化的隐藏原因。我们试图通过一种非传统的分析方法来做到这一点，我们称之为“超级政治研究”。在之前的两卷《街头血案》和《大清算》中，我们认为变化的最重要原因不是政治宣言或已故经济学家的言论，而是改变权力行使界限的隐藏因素。通常，气候、地形、微生物和技术的细微变化会改变暴力的逻辑。它们改变了人们组织生计和自卫的方式。

To prepare yourself for the world that is coming you must understand why it will be different from what most experts tell you. That involves looking closely at the hidden causes of change. We have attempted to do this with an unorthodox analysis we call the study of megapolitics. In two previous volumes, Blood in the Streets and The Great Reckoning, we argued that the most important causes of change are not to be found in political manifestos or in the pronouncements of dead economists, but in the hidden factors that alter the boundaries where power is exercised. Often, subtle changes in climate, topography, microbes, and technology alter the logic of violence. They transform the way people organize their livelihoods and defend themselves.

请注意，我们理解世界如何变化的方法与大多数预测者截然不同。我们不是任何领域的专家，我们假装对某些“主题”比那些花费整个职业生涯培养高度专业知识的人了解得多。相反，我们从外部看问题。我们对我们进行预测的主题了如指掌。最重要的是，这涉及到看清必要性的界限在哪里。当它们发生变化时，社会必然会发生变化，无论人们希望如何。

Notice that our approach to understanding how the world changes is very different from that of most forecasters. We are not experts in anything, in the sense that we pretend to know a great deal more about certain “subjects” than those who have spent their entire careers cultivating highly specialized knowledge. To the contrary, we look from the outside in. We are knowledgeable around the subjects about which we make forecasts. Most of all, this involves seeing where the boundaries of necessity are drawn. When they change, society necessarily changes, no matter what people may wish to the contrary.

我们认为，理解社会如何发展的关键在于理解决定使用暴力的成本和回报的因素。从狩猎群体到帝国，每个人类社会都受到超级政治因素相互作用的影响，这些因素决定了“自然法则”的主流版本。生命总是无处不在的复杂。羔羊和狮子保持着微妙的平衡，在边缘相互作用。如果狮子突然变得更快，它们就会抓住现在逃跑的猎物。如果羔羊突然长大没有翅膀，狮子就会饿死。利用暴力和抵御暴力的能力是改变边缘生活的关键变量。

In our view, the key to understanding how societies evolve is to understand factors that determine the costs and rewards of employing violence. Every human society, from the hunting band to the empire, has been informed by the interactions of megapolitical factors that set the prevailing version of the “laws of nature.” Life is always and everywhere complex. The lamb and the lion keep a delicate balance, interacting at the margin. If lions were suddenly more swift, they would catch prey that now escape. If lambs suddenly grew wings, lions would starve. The capacity to utilize and defend against violence is the crucial variable that alters life at the margin.

我们把暴力置于超级政治理论的核心是有充分理由的。控制暴力是每个社会面临的最重要的困境。正如我们在《大清算》中所写：

We put violence at the center of our theory of megapolitics for good reason. The control of violence is the most important dilemma every society faces. As we wrote in The Great Reckoning:

人们诉诸暴力的原因是暴力往往能带来好处。从某种意义上说，如果一个人想要钱，最简单的方法就是抢钱。对于一支军队夺取油田来说，这和对于一个暴徒抢走一个钱包来说一样简单。正如威廉·普莱费尔所写，权力“总是通过攻击那些拥有它的人，来寻找最便捷的致富之路。”

对繁荣的挑战恰恰在于，掠夺性暴力在某些情况下确实能带来丰厚回报。战争确实改变了一切。它改变了规则。它改变了资产和收入的分配。它甚至决定了谁生谁死。正是暴力确实能带来丰厚回报这一事实使得它难以控制^。12

The reason that people resort to violence is that it often pays. In some ways, the simplest thing a man can do if he wants money is to take it. That is no less true for an army of men seizing an oil field than it is for a single thug taking a wallet. Power, as William Playfair wrote, “has always sought the readiest road to wealth, by attacking those who were in possession of it.”

The challenge to prosperity is precisely that predatory violence does pay well in some circumstances. War does change things. It changes the rules. It changes the distribution of assets and income. It even determines who lives and who dies. It is precisely the fact that violence does pay that makes it hard to control.¹²

用这些术语来思考，有助于我们预见到许多发展，而更了解情况的专家坚称这些发展永远不会发生。例如， 1987 年初出版的《街头血案》就是我们试图调查目前正在进行的伟大超级政治革命的最初阶段的尝试。当时我们认为技术变革正在破坏世界上的权力平衡。我们的主要观点包括：

Thinking in these terms has helped us foresee a number of developments that better-informed experts insisted could never happen. For example, Blood in the Streets, published in early 1987, was our attempt to survey the first stages of the great megapolitical revolution now under way. We argued then that technological change was destabilizing the power equation in the world. Among our principal points:

• 我们说美国的主导地位正在衰落，这将导致经济失衡和困境，包括再次出现 1929 年那样的股市崩盘。专家们几乎一致否认这样的事情会发生。然而，六个月后，即 1987 年 10 月，世界市场遭遇了本世纪最剧烈的抛售。
• We said that American predominance was in decline, which would lead to economic imbalances and distress, including another 1929-style stock market crash. Experts were all but unanimous in denying that such a thing could happen. Yet within six months, in October 1987, world markets were convulsed by the most violent sell-off of the century.
• 我们告诉读者，共产主义一定会垮台。专家们再次大笑。然而，1989 年发生了“没人能预料到”的事件。柏林墙倒塌，革命席卷了从波罗的海到布加勒斯特的共产主义政权。
• We told readers to expect the collapse of Communism. Again, experts laughed. Yet 1989 brought the events that “no one could have predicted.” The Berlin Wall fell, as revolutions swept away Communist regimes from the Baltic to Bucharest.
• 我们解释了为什么布尔什维克从沙皇手中继承下来的多民族帝国“必然会分崩离析”。1991 年 12 月底，镰刀锤子旗帜最后一次在克里姆林宫降下，苏联不复存在。
• We explained why the multiethnic empire the Bolshevik nomenklatura inherited from the tsars would “inevitably crack apart.” At the end of December 1991, the hammer-and-sickle banner was lowered over the Kremlin for the last time as the Soviet Union ceased to exist.
• 在里根军备扩张的鼎盛时期，我们曾认为世界正处于全面裁军的门槛上。这同样被认为是不可能的，甚至是荒谬的。然而，随后的七年却带来了自第一次世界大战结束以来最全面的裁军。
• During the height of the Reagan arms buildup, we argued that the world stood at the threshold of sweeping disarmament. This, too, was considered unlikely, if not preposterous. Yet the following seven years brought the most sweeping disarmament since the close of World War I.
• 当时北美和欧洲的专家指出我们认为日本支持政府可以成功操纵市场的观点，但我们却持相反观点。我们预测日本金融资产繁荣将以萧条告终。柏林墙倒塌后不久，日本股市崩盘，市值缩水近一半。我们仍然认为，其最终低点可能达到或超过华尔街在 1929 年触底后遭受的 89% 的损失。
• At a time when experts in North America and Europe were pointing to Japan for support of the view that governments can successfully rig markets, we said otherwise. We forecast that the Japanese financial assets boom would end in a bust Soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Japanese stock market crashed, losing almost half its value. We continue to believe that its ultimate low could match or exceed the 89 percent loss that Wall Street suffered at the bottom after 1929.
• 当时，几乎所有人，从中产阶级家庭到世界上最大的房地产投资者，似乎都相信房地产市场只会上涨而不会下跌，我们警告说房地产泡沫即将破灭。四年内，全球房地产投资者因房地产价值下跌损失了 1 万多亿美元。
• At a point when almost everyone, from the middle-class family to the world’s largest real estate investors, appeared to believe that property markets could only rise and not fall, we warned that a real estate bust was in the offing. Within four years, real estate investors throughout the world lost more than $1 trillion as property values dropped.
• 早在专家们意识到这一点之前，我们在《街头血案》中就指出，蓝领工人的收入已经下降，而且注定会长期持续下降。当我们今天撰文时，近十年过去了，沉睡的世界终于开始意识到这是事实。美国的平均时薪已经低于艾森豪威尔第二届政府的水平。1993 年，以不变美元计算的平均年化时薪为 18,808 美元。1957 年，当艾森豪威尔宣誓就任第二任期时，美国年化平均时薪为 18,903 美元。
• Long before it was obvious to the experts, we explained in Blood in the Streets that the income of blue-collar workers, had decreased and was destined to continue falling on a long-term basis. As we write today, almost a decade later, it has at last begun to dawn on a sleepy world that this is true. Average hourly wages in the United States have fallen below those achieved in the second Eisenhower administration. In 1993, average annualized hourly wages in constant dollars were $18,808. In 1957, when Eisenhower was sworn in for his second term, U.S. annualized average hourly wages were $18,903.

虽然事后看来， 《街头血案》的主要主题非常准确，但就在几年前，传统思想的捍卫者认为这些主题完全是胡说八道。1987年， 《新闻周刊》的一位评论员将我们的分析斥为“对理性的不加思索的攻击”，反映了晚期工业社会封闭的精神氛围。

While the main themes of Blood in the Streets have proven remarkably accurate with the benefit of hindsight, only a few years ago they were considered rank nonsense by the guardians of conventional thinking. A reviewer in Newsweek in 1987 reflected the closed mental climate of late industrial society when he dismissed our analysis as “an unthinking attack on reason.”

你可能会想，随着时间的推移， 《新闻周刊》和类似的出版物会认识到我们的分析揭示了世界变化的一些有用信息。一点也没有。《大清算》第一版受到的嘲笑和《街头血案》一样多。《华尔街日报》这样的权威媒体断然驳斥了我们的分析，称其是“你那愚蠢的阿姨”的胡言乱语。

You might imagine that Newsweek and similar publications would have recognized with the passage of time that our line of analysis had revealed something useful about the way the world was changing. Not a bit. The first edition of The Great Reckoning was greeted with the same sniggering hostility that welcomed Blood in the Streets. No less an authority than the Wall Street Journal categorically dismissed our analysis as the nattering of “your dopey aunt.”

抛开这些笑声不谈， 《大清算》的主题并不像正统捍卫者所假装的那样荒谬。

This chuckling aside, the themes of The Great Reckoning proved less ludicrous than the guardians of orthodoxy pretended.

• 我们延续了对苏联解体的预测，探讨了为什么俄罗斯和其他前苏联共和国未来将面临国内动乱加剧、恶性通货膨胀和生活水平下降等问题。
• We extended our forecast of the death of the Soviet Union, exploring why Russia and the other former Soviet republics faced a future of growing civil disorder, hyperinflation, and falling living standards.
• 我们解释了为什么 20 世纪 90 年代将是裁员的十年，其中包括这是全球范围内首次出现政府和商业实体的缩减规模。
• We explained why the 1990s would be a decade of downsizing, including for the first time a worldwide downsizing of governments as well as business entities.
• 我们还预测，收入再分配的术语将发生重大改变，福利水平将大幅削减。从加拿大到瑞典，都出现了财政危机的迹象，美国政客开始谈论“结束我们所熟知的福利”。
• We also forecast that there would be a major redefinition of terms of income redistribution, with sharp cutbacks in the level of benefits. Hints of fiscal crisis appeared from Canada to Sweden, and American politicians began to talk of “ending welfare as we know it.”
• 我们预见并解释了为什么“新世界秩序”将被证明是“新世界混乱”。早在波斯尼亚暴行占据头条新闻之前，我们就警告说南斯拉夫将陷入内战。
• We anticipated and explained why the “new world order” would prove to be a “new world disorder.” Well before the atrocities in Bosnia engrossed the headlines, we warned that Yugoslavia would collapse into civil war.
• 在索马里陷入无政府状态之前，我们解释了为什么非洲政府即将崩溃将导致一些国家实际上被置于破产托管状态。
• Before Somalia slid into anarchy, we explained why the pending collapse of governments in Africa would lead some countries there to be effectively placed into receivership.
• 我们预测并解释了为什么激进的伊斯兰教将取代马克思主义成为对抗西方的主要意识形态。
• We forecast and explained why militant Islam would displace Marxism as the principal ideology of confrontation with the West.
• 在俄克拉荷马爆炸案和世界贸易中心炸毁事件发生的几年前，我们就解释了为什么美国会面临恐怖主义的抬头。
• Years before the Oklahoma bombing and the attempt to blow up the World Trade Center, we explained why the United States faced an upsurge in terrorism.
• 在报道席卷洛杉矶、多伦多和其他城市的骚乱的头条新闻之前，我们解释了为什么城市少数群体中犯罪亚文化的出现为大规模犯罪暴力奠定了基础。
• Before the headlines that told of the rioting that swept Los Angeles, Toronto, and other cities, we explained why the emergence of criminal subcultures among urban minorities was setting the stage for widespread criminal violence.
• 我们还预测了“二十世纪最后一次经济大萧条”，这场大萧条始于 1989 年的亚洲，并从全球体系的边缘地区向中心蔓延。我们曾说过，日本股市将在 1929 年后步华尔街后尘，导致信贷崩溃和经济萧条。尽管日本和其他地区的政府大规模干预暂时阻止了市场充分反映信贷状况的恶化，但这只会转移和加剧经济困境，形成竞争性贬值的压力和系统性信贷崩溃，就像 20 世纪 30 年代全球经济崩溃的那种情况一样。
• We also anticipated “the final depression of the twentieth century,” which began in Asia in 1989 and has been spreading back from the periphery toward the center of the global system. We said that the Japanese stock market would follow Wall Street’s path after 1929, and that this would lead to credit collapse and depression. Although massive government intervention in Japan and elsewhere temporarily prevented markets from fully reflecting the deterioration of credit conditions, this only displaced and compounded economic distress, building pressures for competitive devaluations and a systemic credit collapse of the kind that imploded economies worldwide in the 1930s.

《大清算》还提出了一些尚未得到证实或尚未达到我们预测的发展水平的有争议的论点：

The Great Reckoning also spelled out a number of controversial theses that have not yet been confirmed, or have not reached the level of development that we forecast:

• 我们曾说过，1929 年后，日本股市将步华尔街后尘，从而导致信贷崩溃和经济萧条。尽管西班牙、芬兰和其他一些国家的失业率超过了 20 世纪 30 年代的水平，包括日本在内的一些国家也经历了局部萧条，但尚未出现 20 世纪 30 年代全球经济崩溃那样的系统性信贷崩溃。
• We said that the Japanese stock market would follow Wall Street’s path after 1929, and that this would lead to credit collapse and depression. Although unemployment rates in Spain, Finland, and a few other countries exceeded those of the 1930s, and a number of countries, including Japan, did experience local depressions, there has not yet been a systemic credit collapse of the kind that imploded economies worldwide in the 1930s.
• 我们曾认为，前苏联指挥控制系统的崩溃将导致核武器扩散到小国、恐怖分子和犯罪团伙手中。幸运的是，这种情况并没有发生，至少没有达到我们所担心的程度。新闻报道显示，伊朗在黑市上购买了几件战术核武器；更令人担忧的是，伦敦《泰晤士报》于1998 年 10 月 7 日报道说，“据一家主要的阿拉伯报纸报道，流亡的沙特百万富翁恐怖分子头目奥萨马·本·拉登已经从前苏联中亚国家获得了战术核武器。”尽管如此，官方尚未证实部署或使用前苏联军火库中的核武器。
• We argued that the breakdown of the command-and-control system in the former Soviet Union would lead to the spread of nuclear weapons into the hands of ministates, terrorists, and criminal gangs. To the world’s good fortune, this has not come to pass, at least not to the degree that we feared. Press reports indicate that Iran purchased several tactical nuclear weapons on the black market; more worryingly, the Times of London reported on October 7, 1998, that “Osama bin Laden, the exiled millionaire Saudi terrorist leader, has acquired tactical nuclear weapons from the former Soviet Central Asian states, according to a leading Arab newspaper.” That said, there has been no officially confirmed deployment or use of nuclear weapons from the arsenals of the former Soviet Union.
• 我们解释了为什么“禁毒战争”是颠覆毒品泛滥国家（尤其是美国）警察和司法系统的良方。每年都有数百亿美元的隐性垄断利润累积，毒贩有手段也有动机去腐蚀甚至表面上稳定的国家。虽然世界媒体偶尔会报道毒资渗透美国政治体系的高层新闻，但完整的故事尚未被揭露。
• We explained why the “War on Drugs” was a recipe for subverting the police and judicial systems of countries where drug use is widespread, particularly the United States. With tens of billions of dollars in hidden monopoly profits piling up each year, drug dealers have the means as well as the incentive to corrupt even apparently stable countries. While the world media have carried occasional stories hinting at high-level penetration of the U.S. political system by drug money, the full story has not yet been told.

关注别人未关注的地方

Looking Where Others Don’t

尽管我们的预测有误，或者根据目前已知的情况来看似乎是错误的，但这些记录值得仔细推敲。《大清算》预测或预期并解释了 20 世纪 90 年代未来经济史中可能出现的大部分情况。我们的许多预测并不是简单的推断或趋势延伸，而是预测了自二战以来被认为是正常的经济状况将发生重大偏离。我们警告说，20 世纪 90 年代将与前五十年截然不同。阅读 1991 年至 1998 年的新闻，我们发现《大清算》的主题几乎每天都在得到证实。

Notwithstanding the points where our forecasts were mistaken or seem mistaken in light of what is now known, the record stands to scrutiny. Much of what is likely to figure in future economic histories of the 1990s was forecast or anticipated and explained in The Great Reckoning. Many of our predictions were not simple extrapolations or extensions of trends, but forecasts of major departures from what has been considered normal since World War II. We warned that the 1990s would be dramatically different from the previous five decades. Reading the news of 1991 through 1998, we see that the themes of The Great Reckoning were borne out almost daily.

我们认为这些发展并非孤立困难的例子，不是这里麻烦，那里麻烦，而是沿着同一条断层线发生的冲击和震动。旧秩序正在被一场超级政治地震推翻，这场地震将彻底改变机构，改变人们看待世界的方式。

We see these developments not as examples of isolated difficulties, trouble here, trouble there, but as shocks and tremors that run along the same fault line. The old order is being toppled by a megapolitical earthquake that will revolutionize institutions and alter the way thinking people see the world.

尽管暴力在决定世界运作方式方面发挥着核心作用，但令人惊讶的是，它却很少受到重视。大多数政治分析家和经济学家在写作时，都认为暴力只是小事一桩，就像蛋糕周围嗡嗡作响的苍蝇，而不是烤蛋糕的厨师。

In spite of the central role of violence in determining the way the world works, it attracts surprisingly little serious attention. Most political analysts and economists write as if violence were a minor irritant, like a fly buzzing around a cake, and not the chef who baked it.

另一位超级政治先驱

Another Megapolitical Pioneer

事实上，关于暴力在历史中的作用的清晰思考如此之少，以至于一张纸上就可以写出一份超级政治分析的书目。在《大清算》中，我们借鉴并阐述了一部几乎完全被遗忘的超级政治分析经典之作的论点，即威廉·普莱费尔于 1805 年出版的《强国衰亡永久原因探究》。在这里，我们的出发点之一是弗雷德里克·C·莱恩的作品。莱恩是一位中世纪历史学家，他在 20 世纪 40 年代和 50 年代撰写了几篇关于暴力在历史中的作用的深刻论文。其中最全面的可能是 1958 年发表在《经济史杂志》上的《有组织暴力的经济后果》 。除了专业经济学家和历史学家之外，很少有人读过它，他们中的大多数人似乎没有认识到它的重要性。和普莱费尔一样，莱恩是为当时还不存在的读者写作的。

In fact, there has been so little clear thinking about the role of violence in history that a bibliography of megapolitical analysis could be written on a single sheet of paper. In The Great Reckoning, we drew upon and elaborated arguments of an almost entirely forgotten classic of megapolitical analysis, William Playfair’s An Enquiry into the Permanent Causes of the Decline and Fall of Powerful and Wealthy Nations, published in 1805. Here one of our departure points is the work of Frederic C. Lane. Lane was a medieval historian who wrote several penetrating essays on the role of violence in history during the 1940s and 1950s. Perhaps the most comprehensive of these was “Economic Consequences of Organized Violence,” which appeared in the Journal of Economic History in 1958. Few people other than professional economists and historians have read it, and most of them seem not to have recognized its significance. Like Playfair, Lane wrote for an audience that did not yet exist.

信息时代的洞察

Insights for the Information Age

莱恩在信息时代到来之前就发表了关于暴力和战争经济意义的著作。他写作时当然没有预见到微处理或目前正在展开的其他技术革命。然而，他对暴力的洞察为理解社会在信息革命中将如何重塑建立了一个框架。

Lane published his work on violence and the economic meaning of war well before the advent of the Information Age. He certainly was not writing in anticipation of microprocessing or the other technological revolutions now unfolding. Yet his insights into violence established a framework for understanding how society will be reconfigured in the Information Revolution.

莱恩打开的通向未来的窗户，也是他窥视过去的窗户。他是一位中世纪历史学家，尤其是研究贸易城市威尼斯的历史学家，威尼斯的命运在一个充满暴力的世界中起起伏伏。在思考威尼斯如何兴衰时，他的注意力被那些可以帮助你理解未来的问题所吸引。他看到，暴力的组织和控制方式在决定“稀缺资源的用途”方面发挥着重要作用^。13

The window Lane opened into the future was one through which he peered into the past. He was a medieval historian, and particularly a historian of a trading city, Venice, whose fortunes surged and sagged in a violent world. In thinking about how Venice rose and fell, his attention was attracted to issues that can help you understand the future. He saw the fact that how violence is organized and controlled plays a large role in determining “what uses are made of scarce resources.”¹³

我们相信，莱恩对暴力竞争用途的分析可以告诉我们信息时代的生活将如何改变。但不要指望大多数人会注意到，更不用说遵循如此不合时宜的抽象论点。当全世界的注意力都集中在不诚实的辩论和任性的个性上时，大政治的曲折变化几乎无人注意。普通北美人对 OJ 辛普森和莫妮卡莱温斯基的关注可能比对新微技术的关注多一百倍，而新微技术将取代他的工作并颠覆他依赖的政治制度来获得失业补偿。

We believe that Lane’s analyses of the competitive uses of violence has much to tell us about how life is likely to change in the Information Age. But don’t expect most people to notice, much less follow, so unfashionably abstract an argument. While the attention of the world is riveted on dishonest debates and wayward personalities, the meanderings of megapolitics continue almost unnoted. The average North American has probably lavished one hundred times more attention on O. J. Simpson and Monica Lewinsky than he has on the new microtechnologies that are poised to antiquate his job and subvert the political system he depends on for unemployment compensation.

愿望的空虚​​​

THE VANITY OF WISHES

忽视根本重要因素的倾向并不仅限于坐在沙发上看电视的人。各种传统思想家都观察到民主民族国家的一个伪装——人们持有的观点决定了世界变化的方式。看似老练的分析师陷入解释和预测的泥潭，将重大的历史发展解释为仿佛它们是一厢情愿地决定的。就在我们撰写《再见，民族国家，你好……什么？》一文时， 《纽约时报》的社论版上出现了这种推理的一个突出例子^。14民族国家的消亡不仅是我们正在讨论的话题，而且作者将自己展现为一个极好的标志，以说明我们的思维方式与常态相差多远。科尔切斯特不是个傻瓜。他以《经济学人》智库编辑总监的身份写作。如果有人应该形成现实的世界观，那应该是他。然而，他的文章在多处明确指出“国际政府的到来”在“现在从逻辑上来说是不可阻挡的”。

The tendency to overlook what is fundamentally important is not confined solely to the couch dweller watching television. Conventional thinkers of all shapes and sizes observe one of the pretenses of the democratic nation-state —that the views people hold determine the way the world changes. Apparently sophisticated analysts lapse into explanations and forecasts that interpret major historical developments as if they were determined in a wishful way. A striking example of this type of reasoning appeared on the editorial page of the New York Times just as we were writing: “Goodbye, Nation-State, Hello… What?,” by Nicholas Colchester.¹⁴ Not only was the topic, the death of the nation-state, the very topic we are addressing, but its author presents himself as an excellent marker to illustrate how far removed our way of thinking is from the norm. Colchester is no simpleton. He wrote as editorial director of the Economist Intelligence Unit. If anyone should form a realistic view of the world it should be he. Yet his article clearly indicates in several places that “the coming of international government” is “now logically unstoppable.”

原因何在？因为民族国家正在衰落，不再能控制经济力量。

Why? Because the nation-state is faltering and can no longer control economic forces.

我们认为，这种假设近乎荒谬。认为某种特定的新治理形式会因为另一种治理形式失败而出现是一种谬论。按照这种推理，海地和刚果早就有更好的政府了，只是因为他们现有的政府太不完善了。

In our view, this assumption verges on the absurd. To suppose that some specific new form of governance will emerge simply because another has failed is a fallacy. By that reasoning, Haiti and the Congo would long ago have had better government simply because what they had was so luminously inadequate.

科尔切斯特的观点得到了北美和欧洲少数思考此类问题的人的广泛认同，他的观点完全没有考虑到决定哪些类型的政治制度真正可行的更大的超级政治力量。这正是本书的重点。当考虑到塑造新千年的技术时，我们更有可能看到的不是单一世界政府，而是微型政府，甚至接近无政府状态。

Colchester’s point of view, widely shared among the few who think about such things in North America and Europe, utterly fails to take into account the larger megapolitical forces that determine what types of political systems are actually viable. That is the focus of this book. When the technologies that are shaping the new millennium are considered, it is far more likely that we will see not one world government, but microgovernment, or even conditions approaching anarchy.

每当有人认真分析暴力在决定每个人行为规则方面的作用时，就会有数十本关于小麦补贴的复杂性的书籍，还有数百本关于货币政策的神秘方面的书籍。在思考真正决定历史进程的关键问题时，这种缺乏思考的大部分原因可能反映了过去几个世纪权力结构的相对稳定性。在河马背上睡着的鸟不会想到失去栖息处，直到河马真的移动。梦境、神话和幻想在所谓的社会科学中发挥的作用比我们通常认为的要大得多。

For every serious analysis of the role of violence in determining the rules by which everyone operates, dozens of books have been written about the intricacies of wheat subsidies, and hundreds more about arcane aspects of monetary policy. Much of this shortfall in thinking about the crucial issues that actually determine the course of history probably reflects the relative stability of the power configuration over the past several centuries. The bird that falls asleep on the back of a hippopotamus does not think about losing its perch until the hippo actually moves. Dreams, myths, and fantasies play a much larger role in informing the supposed social sciences than we commonly think.

这在有关经济正义的大量文献中尤为明显。每页都用以仔细分析暴力如何塑造社会，从而设定经济必须运行的界限，而关于经济正义和非正义的论述和写作却有数百万字。然而，在现代背景下，经济正义的表述预设了社会被一种强制手段所主宰，这种手段如此强大，以至于它可以夺走并重新分配生活中的美好事物。这种权力只存在了现代时期的几代人。现在它正在逐渐消失。

This is particularly evident in the abundant literature of economic justice. Millions of words have been uttered and written about economic justice and injustice for each page devoted to careful analysis of how violence shapes society, and thus sets the boundaries within which economies must function. Yet formulations of economic justice in the modern context presuppose that society is dominated by an instrument of compulsion so powerful that it can take away and redistribute life’s good things. Such power has existed for only a few generations of the modern period. Now it is fading away.

社会保障老大哥

Big Brother on Social Security

工业技术为政府在二十世纪提供了前所未有的强大控制手段。有一段时间，政府似乎不可避免地会变得如此有效地垄断暴力，以至于个人自主权几乎没有空间。二十世纪中叶，没有人期待个人主权的胜利。

Industrial technology gave governments greater instruments of control in the twentieth century than ever before. For a time, it seemed inevitable that governments would become so effective at monopolizing violence as to leave little room for individual autonomy. Nobody at mid-century was looking forward to the triumph of the Sovereign Individual.

二十世纪中期，一些最敏锐的观察家根据当时的证据确信，民族国家集中权力的趋势将导致极权统治生活的各个方面。在乔治·奥威尔的《1984》（1949 年）中，老大哥看着个人徒劳地挣扎着保持一定程度的自主权和自尊。这似乎是注定要失败的。弗里德里希·冯·哈耶克的《通往奴役之路》（1944 年）采取了更学术的观点，认为自由正在被一种新的经济控制形式所取代，这种控制形式让国家成为一切的主宰。这些作品是在微处理出现之前写的，微处理催生了一系列技术，这些技术提高了小团体甚至个人独立于中央权力的能力。

Some of the shrewdest observers of the mid-twentieth century became convinced on the evidence of the day that the tendency of the nation-state to centralize power would lead to totalitarian domination over all aspects of life. In George Orwell’s 1984 (1949), Big Brother was watching the individual vainly struggle to maintain a margin of autonomy and self-respect. It appeared to be a losing cause. Friedrich von Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom (1944) took a more scholarly view in arguing that freedom was being lost to a new form of economic control that left the state as the master of everything. These works were written before the advent of microprocessing, which has incubated a whole range of technologies that enhance the capacity of small groups and even individuals to function independently of central authority.

哈耶克和奥威尔等观察家虽然精明，但他们过于悲观。历史总是会给我们带来意外。极权共产主义勉强撑过了 1984 年。如果政府成功压制了微技术的解放方面，下个千年还可能出现一种新的农奴制。但更有可能的是，我们将看到前所未有的个人机遇和自主权。我们父母所担心的事情可能根本不是问题。他们认为理所当然的社会生活固定不变的特征现在似乎注定要消失。每当需要为人类选择设置界限时，我们就会相应地调整和重新组织我们的生活。

As shrewd as observers like Hayek and Orwell were, they were unduly pessimistic. History has unfolded its surprises. Totalitarian Communism barely outlasted the year 1984. A new form of serfdom may yet emerge in the next millennium if governments succeed in suppressing the liberating aspects of microtechnology. But it is far more likely that we will see unprecedented opportunity and autonomy for the individual. What our parents worried about may prove to be no problem at all. What they took for granted as fixed and permanent features of social life now seem destined to disappear. Wherever necessity sets boundaries to human choice, we adjust, and reorganize our lives accordingly.

预测的风险

The Hazards of Forecasting

毫无疑问，当我们试图预见和解释生命组织和文化的深刻变化时，我们会冒着失去一点尊严的风险。将它们结合在一起。大多数预测注定在时间的流逝中成为愚蠢的读物。他们所预见的变化越剧烈，他们就越容易犯令人尴尬的错误。世界不会毁灭。臭氧层不会消失。即将到来的冰河时代会融入全球变暖。尽管所有警报都与此相反，但油箱里仍然有石油。安特罗布斯先生是《我们的牙齿之皮》中的普通人，他避免了冰冻，在战争和威胁的经济灾难中幸存下来，并且无视专家们经过深思熟虑的警告而变老。

No doubt we put our small measure of dignity at risk in attempting to foresee and explain profound changes in the organization of life and the culture that binds it together. Most forecasts are doomed to make silly reading in the fullness of time. And the more dramatic the change they envision, the more embarrassingly wrong they tend to be. The world doesn’t end. The ozone doesn’t vanish. The coming Ice Age dissolves into global warming. Notwithstanding all the alarms to the contrary, there is still oil in the tank. Mr. Antrobus, the everyman of The Skin of Our Teeth, avoids freezing, survives wars and threatened economic calamities, and grows old ignoring the studied alarms of experts.

大多数“揭开”未来的尝试很快就变成了笑话。即使个人利益为清晰的思维提供了强大的动力，前瞻性的眼光往往是短视的。1903 年，梅赛德斯公司表示，“全世界的汽车数量永远不会超过 100 万辆。原因是，全世界不可能有 100 万名工匠可以训练成司机。” ¹⁵

Most attempts to “unveil” the future soon turn out to be comic. Even where self-interest provides a strong incentive to clear thinking, forward vision is often myopic. In 1903, the Mercedes company said that “there would never be as many as 1 million automobiles worldwide. The reason was that it was implausible that as many as 1 million artisans worldwide would be trainable as chauffeurs.”¹⁵

认识到这一点应该让我们闭嘴。但事实并非如此。我们并不害怕受到应有的嘲笑。如果我们犯了大错，后代可能会尽情地大笑，因为他们认为还有人记得我们说过的话。敢于思考就要冒犯错的风险。我们绝不会僵硬无用，害怕犯错。远非如此。我们宁愿冒险提出可能对你有用的想法，也不愿因为担心事后会夸大其词或令人尴尬而压抑它们。

Recognizing this should stop our mouths. It doesn’t. We are not afraid to stand in line for a due share of ridicule. If we mistake matters greatly, future generations may laugh as heartily as they please, presuming anyone remembers what we said. To dare a thought is to risk being wrong. We are hardly so stiff and useless that we are afraid to err. Far from it. We would rather venture thoughts that might prove useful to you than suppress them out of apprehension that they might prove overblown or embarrassing in retrospect.

正如阿瑟·克拉克敏锐地指出的那样，预测未来的尝试通常失败的两个主要原因是“勇气的失败和想象力的失败”。16^他写道，在这两者中，“勇气的失败似乎更为常见；这种情况发生在即使给出了所有相关事实，准预言家也无法看到它们指向一个不可避免的结论时。其中一些失败是如此荒谬，几乎令人难以置信。” ¹⁷

As Arthur C. Clarke shrewdly noted, the two overriding reasons why attempts to anticipate the future usually fall flat are “Failure of Nerve and Failure of Imagination.”¹⁶ Of the two, he wrote, “Failure of Nerve seems to be the more common; it occurs when even given all the relevant facts the would-be prophet cannot see that they point to an inescapable conclusion. Some of these failures are so ludicrous as to be almost unbelievable.”¹⁷

如果我们对信息革命的探索无法达到预期，那么这更多的是因为我们缺乏想象力，而不是缺乏勇气。预测未来一直是一项大胆的事业，它理应引起人们的怀疑。也许时间会证明我们的推论完全错误。与诺查丹玛斯不同，我们并不假装自己是预言家。我们不会通过在碗中搅动魔杖或预测星座来预测未来。我们也不会写出神秘的诗句。我们的目的是为您提供对可能对您至关重要的问题的冷静、客观的分析。

Where our exploration of the Information Revolution falls short, as it inevitably will, the cause will be due more to a lack of imagination than to a lack of nerve. Forecasting the future has always been a bold enterprise, one which properly excites skepticism. Perhaps time will prove that our deductions are wildly off the mark. Unlike Nostradamus, we do not pretend to be prophetic personalities. We do not foretell the future by stirring a wand in a bowl of water or by casting horoscopes. Nor do we write in cryptic verse. Our purpose is to provide you with a sober, detached analysis of issues that could prove to be of great importance to you.

我们感到有义务表达我们的观点，即使这些观点看起来是异端邪说，因为否则这些观点可能无人听闻。在晚期工业社会封闭的精神氛围中，思想无法通过既有媒体自由交流。

We feel an obligation to set out our views, even where they seem heretical, precisely because they may not otherwise be heard. In the closed mental atmosphere of late industrial society, ideas do not traffic as freely as they should through the established media.

这本书是本着建设性精神写的。这是我们写的第三本本书将分析当前正在发生的大变革的各个阶段。像《街头血案》和《大清算》一样，本书也是一场思维练习。它探讨了工业社会的消亡及其新形式的重构。我们期待在未来几年看到惊人的悖论。一方面，随着主权个人的出现，你将见证一种新形式的自由的实现。你可以期待看到生产力几乎完全解放。与此同时，我们期待看到现代民族国家的消亡。西方人在二十世纪逐渐视为理所当然的许多平等保证注定会随之消亡。我们期待现在所知的代议制民主将逐渐消失，取而代之的是网络市场中的新民主选择。如果我们的推论正确，下个世纪的政治将比我们已经习惯的政治更加多样化，也更加不重要。

This book is written in a constructive spirit. It is the third we have written together, analyzing various stages of the great change now under way. Like Blood in the Streets and The Great Reckoning, it is a thought exercise. It explores the death of industrial society and its reconfiguration in new forms. We expect to see amazing paradoxes in the years to come. On the one hand, you will witness the realization of a new form of freedom, with the emergence of the Sovereign Individual. You can expect to see almost the complete liberation of productivity. At the same time, we expect to see the death of the modern nation-state. Many of the assurances of equality that Western people have grown to take for granted in the twentieth century are destined to die with it. We expect that representative democracy as it is now known will fade away, to be replaced by the new democracy of choice in the cybermarketplace. If our deductions are correct, the politics of the next century will be much more varied and less important than that to which we have become accustomed.

我们相信，尽管我们的论点涉及的领域与偏僻地区和贫民窟无异，但读者还是会很容易理解。如果我们的意思在某些地方无法完全理解，那不是因为我们在耍小聪明，也不是因为我们使用了那些假装通过发表神秘声明来预测未来的人所采用的古老含糊其辞。我们不是含糊其辞的人。如果我们的论点不清楚，那是因为我们没有能够以一种让读者理解令人信服的想法的方式写作。与许多预测者不同，我们希望您能够理解甚至复制我们的思路。它不是基于心灵的幻想或行星的旋转，而是基于老式的、丑陋的逻辑。出于非常合乎逻辑的原因，我们相信微处理将不可避免地颠覆和摧毁民族国家，并在这一过程中创造新的社会组织形式。您有必要也有可能预见到可能比您想象的更快到来的新生活方式的至少一些细节。

We are confident that our argument will be easy to follow, notwithstanding the fact that it leads through some territory that is the intellectual equivalent of the backwoods and bad neighborhoods. If our meaning is not entirely intelligible in places, that is not because we are being cute, or using the time-honored equivocation of those who pretend to foretell the future by making cryptic pronouncements. We are not equivocators. If our arguments are unclear, it is because we have failed the task of writing in a way that makes compelling ideas accessible. Unlike many forecasters, we want you to understand and even duplicate our line of thinking. It is based not upon psychic reveries or the gyrations of planets, but upon old-fashioned, ugly logic. For quite logical reasons, we believe that microprocessing will inevitably subvert and destroy the nation-state, creating new forms of social organization in the process. It is both necessary and possible for you to foresee at least some details of the new way of life that may be here sooner than you think.

预言未来的讽刺

Ironies of a Future Foretold

几个世纪以来，这个千年的结束一直被视为历史上意义重大的时刻。850 多年前，圣马拉奇将 2000 年定为最后审判日。美国通灵师埃德加·凯西在 1934 年说过，地球将在 2000 年绕地轴移动，导致加利福尼亚一分为二，纽约市和日本被淹没。日本火箭科学家 Hideo Itokawa 在 1980 年宣布，1999 年 8 月 18 日行星在“大十字”中排列将造成大范围的环境破坏，导致地球上人类生命的终结^。18

For centuries, the end of this millennium has been seen as a pregnant moment in history. More than 850 years ago, St. Malachy fixed 2000 as the date of the Last Judgment. American psychic Edgar Cayce said in 1934 that the earth would shift on its axis in the year 2000, causing California to split in two and inundating New York City and Japan. A Japanese rocket scientist, Hideo Itokawa, announced in 1980 that the alignment of the planets in a “Grand Cross” on August 18, 1999, would cause widespread environmental devastation, leading to the end of human life on earth.¹⁸

这种末日景象很容易被嘲笑。毕竟，2000 年虽然是一个令人印象深刻的整数，但似乎只是公元 2000 年是西方采用的基督教历法随意制定的产物。其他历法和纪年系统则从不同的起点来计算世纪和千年。例如，按照伊斯兰历法，公元2000 年是 1378 年。这听起来再普通不过的一年了。而按照每 60 年重复一次的中国历法，公元2000 年只不过是另一个龙年。它是延续数千年的连续循环的一部分。然而，2000 年不仅仅意味着神学上的投入。它的重要性不仅受到基督教传统的支持，也受到本世纪中叶信息技术的局限性的影响。所谓的 Y2K 或 2000 年计算机问题，是数十亿行计算机代码中存在的潜在毁灭性逻辑缺陷，它可能会在千禧年的午夜关闭工业社会的基本要素，从而近似于世界末日的状况。许多计算机和微处理器使用的软件都是从计算机早期保存和回收的，当时内存空间每兆字节 60 万美元，比黄金还贵。为了节省昂贵的空间，早期的程序员只用年份的最后两位数字来记录日期。这种使用两位数日期字段的惯例被延续到大型计算机中使用的大多数软件中，甚至在个人计算机和所谓的嵌入式芯片、微处理器中也得到了广泛应用，这些微处理器用于控制几乎所有的东西，从录像机到汽车点火系统、安全系统、电话、控制电话网络的交换系统、工厂、发电厂、炼油厂、化工厂、管道等中的工艺和控制系统。因此，如果缩写成两位数字段，1999 年将是“99”。问题在于当 2000 年出现 00 时会发生什么。许多计算机会将其读作 1900。这可能会导致许多未经修复的计算机和其他数字设备无法在日期字段中识别 2000 年。

Such visions of apocalypse make a plump target for ridicule. After all, the year 2000, while an imposing round number, would appear to be only an arbitrary artifact of the Christian calendar as adopted in the West. Other calendars and dating systems calculate centuries and millennia from different starting points. By the reckoning of the Islamic calendar, for example, A.D. 2000 will be the year 1378. As ordinary-sounding as a year can be. According to the Chinese calendar, which repeats itself every sixty years, A.D. 2000 is just another year of the dragon. It is part of a continuous cycle that extends millennia into the past. Yet there is more than theological investment in the year 2000. Its importance is undergirded not only by Christian tradition, but by the limitations of mid-century information technology. The so-called Y2K or year 2000 computer problem, a potentially devastating logic flaw in billions of lines of computer code, could approximate apocalyptic conditions by closing down essential elements of industrial society on the millennial midnight. Many computers and microprocessors use software preserved and recycled from the earliest days of computers, when memory space, at $600,000 per megabyte, was more valuable than gold. To save expensive space, the early programmers tracked dates with only the last two numbers of the year. This convention of employing two-digit date fields was carried over into most software employed in mainframe computers, and even found wide use in personal computers and so-called embedded chips, microprocessors that are used to control almost everything, from VCRs to car ignition systems, security systems, telephones, the switching systems that control the telephone network, process and control systems in factories, power plants, oil refineries, chemical plants, pipelines and much more. Thus, abbreviated into a two-digit field, the year 1999 would be “99.” The trouble is what happens when 00 comes up for the year 2000. Many computers will read this as 1900. This may make it impossible for many unremediated computers and other digital devices to recognize the year 2000 in date fields.

其结果将是一个严重的数据损坏问题，这将意外地说明信息战的新潜力。在信息时代，潜在的对手将能够通过引爆“逻辑炸弹”造成严重破坏，这些炸弹会破坏重要系统的功能，破坏其功能所依赖的数据。例如，在军事演习中，如果你能破坏飞机安全运行所必需的数据，你就不需要击落飞机了。数据损坏几乎可以像物理武器一样阻碍现代社会的运作。经过深思熟虑，这会产生深远的影响，这是显而易见的。例如，伦敦邮^报于1997 年 12 月 14 日报道，全球航空公司计划在 2000 年 1 月 1 日取消数百个航班，因为担心空中交通管制系统可能会出现故障。19潜在的问题不仅包括空中交通系统，还包括飞机本身内置的日期敏感功能。根据波音公司，许多飞机都需要进行 Y2K 补救。如果许多设备试图在无效日期记录事件，它们可能会出现问题。如果飞机的电传操纵计算机控制系统被编程为得出关键维护最后一次是在 1900 年进行的结论，它们可能会发生故障。它们甚至可能进入错误循环并关闭。

The result will be a massive problem of data corruption that will provide an accidental illustration of a new potential for information warfare. In the Information Age, potential adversaries will be able to wreak havoc by detonating “logic bombs” that sabotage the functions of essential systems by corrupting the data upon which their functioning depends. As a military exercise, for example, you would not need to shoot down an airplane, if you could corrupt data crucial to its safe operation. Data corruption can do almost as much as physical weapons can to thwart the function of a modern society. That this has potentially far-reaching consequences should be obvious on reflection. For example, the Mail of London reported on December 14, 1997, that airlines around the globe were planning to cancel hundreds of flights on January 1, 2000 out of fear that air traffic control systems could fail.¹⁹ Potential problems include not only the air traffic systems, but also date-sensitive functions built into the airplanes themselves. According to Boeing, many airplanes will require Y2K remediation. Many devices may have a problem if they try to log an event on an invalid date. The fly-by-wire computer-controlled systems that operate airplanes may malfunction if they are programmed to conclude that crucial maintenance was last performed in the year 1900. They many even go into an error loop and shut down.

逻辑定时炸弹可能会产生致命的反馈效应，关闭不合规的控制系统，从而让千禧年因不愉快的原因而成为一个值得纪念的日子。请记住，即使您足够幸运，在新千年开始时没有发现自己在半空中，您也可能受到许多设备进入错误循环并关闭的影响。

The potentially lethal feedback effects of a logic time bomb that closes down noncompliant control systems could make the turn of the millennium a memorable date for unpleasant reasons. Remember, you can be affected by many devices that go into an error loop and shut down even if you are lucky enough not to find yourself in midair when the new millennium begins.

最好避免因不​​符合 Y2K 标准的心脏起搏器或醉酒的千禧一代狂欢者而引发的事故，因为如果心脏起搏器关闭，电话系统也可能会关闭，所以救护车可能永远不会来。除非您住在巴西或乌克兰，否则您习惯于拿起电话或打开车载电话并自动听到拨号音。幸运的是，您很少需要关心电话系统如何运行的技术细节。但事实证明，电话网络交换机和路由器高度依赖日期。所有连接都记录到日期和时间，这对于计算计费的通话时长至关重要。如果您恰好在 1999 年 12 月 31 日 11:59:30 拨打了一分钟的电话，而在 12:00:00 系统读取您的通话时长超过 99 年，则可能会出现错误循环和关机。虽然长途公司正在投入巨资升级交换机以使其符合 2000 年标准，本地服务提供商大概也是如此，但如果有几家较小的公司未能符合标准并倒闭，整个网络都可能受到影响。在 2000 年 1 月 1 日，您能听到拨号音就算幸运了。

You would be well advised to avoid an accident arising from non-Y2K-compliant pacemakers, or simply inebriated millennial revelers, because if the pacemakers shut down, the phone system might also, so the ambulance might never come. Unless you live in Brazil or Ukraine, you are used to picking up the telephone or turning on the car phone and automatically getting a dial tone. Happily, you seldom have to concern yourself with the technical details of how the telephone system operates. But it turns out that phone network switches and routers are highly date dependent. All connections are logged to a date and time, which is crucial to calculating call duration for billing. If you happen to make a one-minute call at 11:59:30 on December 31, 1999, and at 12:00:00 the system reads your call as having had a negative duration of more than 99 years, error loops and shutdown are possible. While long-distance companies are spending great sums to upgrade their switches to make them year 2000 compliant, and local service providers presumably are too, if even a few smaller companies fail to comply and go down, the whole network could be affected. You will be lucky to get a dial tone on January 1, 2000.

用 Y2K 问题专家 Peter de Jager 的话来说，“如果我们失去了打电话的能力，那么我们将失去一切。我们将失去电子资金转账、失去交易、失去银行分行。”而 Y2K 问题造成的后续后果可能远不止这些。

In the words of the Y2K expert Peter de Jager, “If we lose the ability to make a phone call, then we lose everything. We lose electronic fund transfers, we lose trading, we lose branch banking.” And the follow-on consequences of Y2K failures could come to more than that.

今天，没有人知道 2000 年问题会给多么普遍的重要系统带来影响。1976 年以后生产的汽车、卡车和公共汽车中都存在无法重新编程、但若因日期问题而无法正常工作则必须更换的嵌入式系统。（也许您不会遇到由不合规心脏起搏器的人驾驶的车辆事故，因为他们的车辆可能无法启动。）嵌入式系统还广泛用于各种类型的发电厂、供水和污水处理系统、医疗设备、军事设备、飞机、海上石油平台、油轮、报警系统和电梯。虽然许多微处理器组件不执行日期敏感功能，但它们的内部操作可能仍依赖于时钟，而时钟可能对 Y2K 问题敏感。

Today, no one knows how pervasively crucial systems will crash because of the year 2000 problem. Embedded systems that cannot be reprogrammed but must be replaced if nonfunctional on a date-sensitive basis are found in cars, trucks, and buses built after 1976. (Perhaps you won’t be in an accident with vehicles driven by persons with noncompliant pacemakers, because their vehicles might not start.) Embedded systems are also widespread in all types of power plants, water and sewage systems, medical devices, military equipment, aircraft, offshore oil platforms, oil tankers, alarm systems, and elevators. While many assemblies of microprocessors perform no date-sensitive functions, they may nonetheless depend upon a clock, which may be Y2K sensitive, for their internal operations.

大型机和Y2K定时炸弹​​

MAINFRAMES AND THE Y2K TIME BOMB

政府和大公司的大型指挥和控制系统涉及大型计算机的大量交易，这是 Y2K 问题最初关注的焦点。由于这些系统运行在大型机器上，而这些机器上的大多数软件都已有几十年的历史，而且大多不符合标准，因此，最初由 Peter de Jager 在 20 世纪 90 年代初发出的 Y2K 警报主要集中在需要升级大型多处理大型计算机的操作系统上。de Jager 先生担心，即使每个拥有易受攻击系统的公司和政府机构几年前就开始使用应急程序，也可能没有足够的程序员熟悉 COBOL（旧的大型计算机语言），无法完成对日期敏感代码的必要修补和修复。由于这种情况并没有发生，而且许多日期敏感信息系统的操作员才刚刚开始评估其漏洞，因此您可以高度自信地预测，许多大型计算机系统将无法顺利运行到 2000 年。

The large-scale command and control systems of government and major corporations that involve high transaction volumes on mainframe computers were the original focus of Y2K concern. Because they operate on big machines for which most software is decades old and mostly noncompliant, the original alarms about Y2K, first sounded by Peter de Jager early in the 1990s, have focused mainly on the need to upgrade operating systems for big, multiprocessing mainframes. Mr. de Jager voiced concern that there might not be enough programmers conversant with COBOL, the old mainframe language, to complete the necessary patches and repairs to date-sensitive code, even if every company and government agency with a vulnerable system had begun a crash program several years ago. Since this has not happened, and many operators of date-sensitive information systems have only just begun to assess their vulnerability, you can predict with a high degree of confidence that many mainframe systems will not be prepared to operate smoothly into the year 2000.

这当然是一个重大问题，因为在当今经济结构下，计算机处理确实没有其他选择。大多数规模大到需要大型计算机来处理交易的企业都依赖于无法用老式十九世纪文书工作系统管理的交易量。如果这些企业被迫恢复纸质文件，他们只能完成正常交易量的一小部分。业务量下降带来的收入冲击将危及除资本最雄厚的公司以外的所有公司的生存。

This is certainly a major concern because there is really no alternative to computer processing as the economy is now structured. Most businesses that are large enough to require a mainframe to handle their transactions are dependent upon transaction volumes that could not be managed with old-fashioned nineteenth-century paperwork systems. If such businesses were forced to revert to shuffling paper they could expect to complete only a fraction of their normal transaction volume. The revenue shock from such a drop-off in business would endanger the survival of all but the most highly capitalized companies.

几乎所有与金钱相关的事物——发票、采购和工资系统，以及库存控制和法规遵从——都会被搞乱。由于计算机崩溃或因 Y2K 问题而产生错误数据，大量数据将丢失。在某些情况下，如果系统立即崩溃，而不是不断损坏数据，直到大规模故障引起人们的注意，这实际上是一种福音。当备份实用程序将 07/04/99 的文件复制到 01/04/00 的更新时，文件会发生什么？谁知道呢？计算机是否会将 1900 年 1 月 4 日支付的保险费解释为该保单已拖欠一个世纪的信号，从而导致保单被取消并从文件中删除？银行和金融公司的计算机是否会试图评估跨越新千年的贷款的一百年利息？您的银行和经纪公司是否会保留您的账户余额的准确记录并让您及时访问您的资金？这些只是您由于千年虫问题而面临的一些有趣的困境。

Almost everything related to money—invoicing, purchasing, and payroll systems, plus inventory controls and regulatory compliance—would be fouled up. Huge quantities of data would be lost as computers crash or spew out false data in response to the Y2K problem. In some cases, it would actually prove a blessing if systems crash immediately rather than corrupting their data on a compounding basis until massive malfunction draws attention to the problem. What happens to files when a backup utility copies files originating on 07/04/99 to an update on 01/04/00? Who knows? Will the computer interpret a payment made on January 4, “1900,” for an insurance policy as a signal that the policy has been in default for a century, resulting in a canceled policy that is stricken from the file? Will banks and finance company computers seek to assess a hundred years of interest on loans that span the shift to the new millennium? Will your banks and brokerage firms retain accurate records of your account balances and give you timely access to your funds? These are just some of the interesting quandaries that you will confront because of the Y2K problem.

“这可能是 2000 年问题中最具破坏性的部分。这不是工资迟发几天带来的不便。这是血流成河的部分。”

—DR . L EON K APPELMAN，信息管理学会2000年工作组联合主席​​

“This is potentially the most destructive part of the year 2000 problem. This isn’t the inconvenience part where your paycheck comes a few days late. This is the blood-in-the-streets part.”

—DR. LEON KAPPELMAN, CO-CHAIR, SOCIETY FOR INFORMATION MANAGEMENT’S YEAR 2000 WORKING GROUP

您的担忧中还应该包括如果由于与 Y2K 相关的故障而导致电力中断，将会发生什么情况。没有电，即使大多数未受 Y2K 影响的系统也无法运行：您的冰箱、冰柜，甚至热源。Y2K 合规问题可能会影响核电站的安全相关访问和控制功能。例如，核设施的人员佩戴剂量测定设备，以测量他们在工厂内受到的辐射暴露量。这些设备会定期进行分析，暴露量数据保存在控制人员进入设施的计算机系统中。显然，如果控制计算机发生故障，它们将破坏所有旨在确保安全运行和保证正确维护的精心控制。但更重要的是，核管理委员会的一份备忘录指出，许多“与安全无关但重要的基于计算机的系统，主要是工厂运营所需的数据库和数据收集”，都是日期敏感的。

Also high on your list of concerns should be what happens if the electricity goes off because of Y2K-related malfunctions. Without electricity, even most systems that are not Y2K-impaired will not function: your refrigerator, your freezer, perhaps even your source of heat. Y2K compliance issues could effect safety-related access and control functions at nuclear power plants. For example, personnel at nuclear facilities wear dosimetry devices that measure the amount of radiation exposure they receive while in the plant. These devices are analyzed regularly, with the data on exposure amounts maintained on a computer system that controls personnel access to the facility. Obviously, if the controlling computers fail, they will make a hash of all the elaborate controls designed to insure safe operation and guarantee proper maintenance. But, more importantly, a Nuclear Regulatory Commission memo notes that many “non-safety-related, but important computer-based systems, primarily databases and data collection necessary for plant operations,” are date sensitive.

传统发电厂同样容易受到 Y2K 干扰。首先，燃煤电厂容易受到将煤炭运送到锅炉的地面运输系统干扰的影响。在 1997-1998 年冬季供暖季节，由于南太平洋铁路和联合太平洋铁路系统合并导致西部煤炭的铁路运输放缓，燃煤发电运营商在某些情况下被迫减少产量。问题的出现是因为两家铁路公司使用的计算机控制和调度系统不兼容。据联合太平洋公司的一位发言人称，尽管联合太平洋技术公司被认为是开发计算机化运输控制系统的行业领导者，但整合这两个系统却成了一场“噩梦”。由于编程困难，铁路公司无法准确跟踪其货车的移动。联合太平洋公司未能掌握南太平洋公司的同化，这是一个不祥之兆，预示着 Y2K 逻辑定时炸弹会破坏运输、发电和经济的其他方面。

The conventional generating plants are not less vulnerable to Y2K disruption. For one thing, coal-powered plants are susceptible to disruptions in the surface transportation system that brings the coal to the boilers. In the 1997-1998 winter heating season, operators of coal-fired electricity generation found themselves forced to reduce output in some instances because of a slowdown in rail deliveries of Western coal arising from the merger of the Southern Pacific and Union Pacific railway systems. The problem arose because of incompatibilities between the computer control and dispatch systems employed by the two railroads. According to a Union Pacific spokesman, integrating the two systems became a “nightmare,” in spite of the fact that Union Pacific Technologies has been considered an industry leader in developing computerized transportation control systems. As a result of the programming difficulties, the railroad was unable to accurately track the movements of its freight cars. The failure of Union Pacific to master the assimilation of Southern Pacific is a bad omen about what could happen when Y2K logic time bombs disrupt transportation, power generation, and other aspects of the economy.

然而，对电网最大的担忧来自于整个系统受到敏感监控和计算机控制将电力从发电过剩的地区输送到发电不足的地区。这一过程必须由计算机仔细监控，以防止电涌和系统故障。所有的电力输送都按时间和日期记录持续时间，就像电话连接一样。虽然连接时使用重型机械继电器，但它们由计算机系统控制。这些对于负载平衡至关重要的计算机控件可能会因为与电话网络相同的原因而失效。事实上，北美的电力负荷分配控制系统通过 T-1 线路和电话微波链路联网。因此，如果电话网络发生故障，电力也会中断。请记住，正如 1998 年 1 月加拿大的经历所证实的那样，一旦大面积断电，恢复系统运行是一项挑战。停电可能会持续很长时间。

The biggest worry about the electric grid, however, arises from the fact that the whole system is subject to sensitive monitoring and computer control to transfer electricity from areas of surplus generation to those with a deficit. This process must be carefully monitored by computer to prevent power surges and system failures. All the transfers of electricity are logged to time and date for duration, much like a telephone connection. While heavy-duty mechanical relays are used to make the connections, they are controlled by computer systems. These computer controls, essential for load balancing, may fail for the same reasons as the phone networks. In fact, the power load distribution-control systems in North America are networked together through T-1 lines and telephone microwave links. So if the phone network fails, you can expect the electricity to go down as well. And remember, as the experience in Canada in January 1998 confirms, once the electricity shuts down over a wide area, getting the system running again is a challenge. A blackout may last for an inconveniently long time.

Y2K和核武器库​​

Y2K AND THE NUCLEAR ARSENAL

对于现代经济体来说，在隆冬时节断电将带来混乱，并可能威胁健康，尤其是对那些依赖电热和医疗设备的人来说。然而，最坏的情况甚至更糟。据克林顿总统的 Y2K 转换委员会负责人约翰·科斯金 (John Koskinen) 称，美国军方武器库可能会在 1999 年 12 月 31 日午夜停止运作。科斯金表示他不希望引起不必要的恐慌，但他补充说，“这需要担心。”对核导弹的一个担忧是“如果数据无法正常工作，它们真的会爆炸。”

For modern economies to have the electricity turn off in the dead of winter would be disruptive and potentially health threatening, especially for those who depend upon electric heat and medical equipment. Yet the worst case scenario is even worse. According to John Koskinen, who heads President Clinton’s Y2K Conversion Council, U.S. military arsenals may cease to function on the stroke of midnight, December 31, 1999. While indicating that he does not wish to touch off undue alarm, Koskinen adds, “It needs to be worried about.” One concern about nuclear missiles “is if the data doesn’t function and they actually go off.”

当然，这种担忧同样适用于俄罗斯核导弹，甚至比美国更严重。俄罗斯的破产使得 Y2K 合规升级比美国更加困难。有证据表明，俄罗斯尚未认真对待 Y2K 转换。虽然人们会祈祷不会发生意外发射，但毫无疑问，2000 年的到来可能会加剧全球不安全状况，原因可能是许多国家的军事通信系统可能无法正常运行。正如科斯金所说：“如果你身处一个国家，突然无法弄清楚到底发生了什么，而且你的通信也无法正常工作，你会更加紧张。”所以，请把这列在你的 Y2K 担忧清单上。逻辑定时炸弹可能会引发真正爆炸性的炸弹发射——这一事实凸显了信息战对集中指挥和控制系统的危险。

Of course, this concern would apply with equal or greater force to Russian nuclear missiles. Russia’s bankruptcy has made upgrades for Y2K compliance even more problematic than in the United States. And there is evidence that Russia is not yet taking Y2K conversion seriously. While one would pray that no accidental launches would occur, there should be little doubt that the turn of the year 2000 has a potential for aggravating global insecurity if for no other reason than that military communications systems in many countries may not function normally. As Koskinen puts it, “If you’re sitting in a country and suddenly you can’t quite figure out exactly what’s happening, and your communications don’t work as well, you get even more nervous.” So put that on your list of Y2K worries. The logic time bomb could precipitate the launch of genuinely explosive bombs—a fact that highlights the danger from information warfare to centralized command and control systems.

如果恐怖分子希望袭击任何集中式系统，他们可能会选择 1999 年 12 月 31 日作为行动日期，因为这将是许多系统都存在漏洞。不仅通信会非常紧张，可能会出现电力故障、车辆无法启动、警察、消防和救护车 911 服务无法使用等情况，而且您可能认为理所当然的许多其他功能（如空中交通管制）也可能会停止运行。没有电就意味着水龙头没有水。污水处理系统会失效。交通信号灯可能会熄灭。在交通系统真正发生故障的几个小时内，杂货店里的食物就会被抢购一空。（或被抢劫）。根据美国城市最近的经验，您可以假设没有电、没有水、许多地方没有暖气、没有灯光，以及与警察和消防等紧急服务部门的通信中断，所有这些都会导致文明消失。虽然没有人能确定 Y2K 问题会造成什么影响，但它可能会扩大到街头抢劫和骚乱，尤其是如果人们知道可能会出现大面积无法发放工资、福利和养老金支票的情况。

If terrorists wish to strike any centralized system, they may pick December 31, 1999, as the date for action because it will be a time of maximum vulnerability of many systems. Not only will communications be strained at best, with the possibility that electricity may fail, vehicles may not start, police, fire, and ambulance 911 service may not work, and so on, but many other functions you probably take for granted, such as air traffic control, may cease to function. No power means no water from the tap. Sewage systems would fail. Traffic lights could turn off. Within a few hours of a genuine breakdown in the transportation system, food in grocery stores would be shopped out. (Or looted.) On the basis of recent experience in American cities, you could suppose that no power, no water, no heat for many, no light, and fragmented communications with emergency services, including police and fire, all add up to no civilization. While no one can be sure what the impact of the Y2K problem may be, it could extend to looting and rioting in the streets, especially if it becomes known that there could be widespread failures to issue payroll, welfare and pension checks.

“我们不会再是以前的我们，但我们会开始成为不同的人。” ²⁰

—约阿希姆·德·菲奥雷

“We shall not be what we have been, but we shall begin to be other.”²⁰

—JOACHIM DE FIORE

对新千年厄运的预感并不一定基于与基督教信仰相关的神学，但它们确实符合约阿希姆德菲奥雷的千禧年传统，他的调解使他相信基督只是“历史的第二个枢纽”，另一个枢纽注定会展开。” ²¹哲学家迈克尔格罗索也持同样的观点，他认为信息革命正在引导人类历史实现西方世界的预言愿景。他称之为“技术末日”。无论技术发展是否受到千禧年愿景的影响，Y2K 现象都是西方主流时间想象的产物。奇怪的是，它可以补充梦境、遐想和愿景，或对愿景的数字解释，例如牛顿对但以理预言的注释。这些直觉的飞跃始于将基督的诞生视为历史中心事实的视角。它们与大整数的心理力量相结合，每个交易者都会意识到大整数具有引人注目的特质。我们时代的第 2000 年必然成为直觉型人士想象的焦点。

Premonitions of doom about the new millennium do not necessarily rest upon theology tied to the Christian faith, but they do fit within the millennial tradition of Joachim de Fiore whose mediations convinced him that Christ was only “the second hinge of history” and that another was destined to unfold.”²¹ So argues the philosopher Michael Grosso, who suggests that the Information Revolution is piloting human history toward the realization of the prophetic vision of the Western world. He calls this “technocalypse.” Whether or not the development of technology is somehow informed by millennial visions, the Y2K phenomenon is an artifact of the predominant Western imagination of time. In a strange way, it could complement dreams, reveries and visions, or numerical interpretations of visions, like Newton’s gloss on the prophecies of Daniel. These intuitive leaps begin with a perspective that takes the birth of Christ to be the central fact of history. They are compounded by the psychological power of large round numbers, which every trader will recognize as having an arresting quality. The two thousandth year of our epoch cannot help but become a focus for the imagination of intuitive people.

评论家很容易让这些预兆显得愚蠢，甚至不考虑《启示录》和《最后审判》中模糊且有争议的神学观念，正是这些观念赋予了这些预兆如此强大的力量。然而有趣的是，Y2K 计算机故障胜过了这种算术即使在基督教框架内似乎也会贬低 2000 年的重要性。2000 年有可能成为下一历史阶段的转折点，因为它提前了新千年的到来。严格地说，下一个千年要到 2001 年才开始。2000 年只是二十世纪的最后一年，即基督诞生以来的第 2000 年。或者如果基督出生于公元第一年的话，情况也是如此。但事实并非如此。公元 533 年，当基督的诞生取代罗马建国日期作为根据西方历法计算年份的基础时，引入新惯例的僧侣们错误地计算了基督的诞生。现在人们普遍认为他出生于公元前4 年。根据这个基础，自他诞生以来整整 2000 年是在 1997 年的某个时候完成的。因此卡尔荣格开始新时代的日期似乎很奇怪。

A critic could easily make these premonitions seem silly, without even addressing the ambiguous and debatable theological notions of the Apocalypse and the Last Judgment that give these visions so much of their power. Interestingly, however, the Y2K computer glitch trumps the errors of arithmetic that otherwise might seem to devalue the importance of the year 2000 even within the Christian framework. The year 2000 has the potential to become an inflection point for the next stage of history simply because it brings forward the arrival of the new millennium. In strict logic, the next millennium will not begin until 2001. The year 2000 will be only the last year of the twentieth century, the two thousandth year since Christ’s birth. Or it would be had Christ been born in the first year of the Christian era. He was not. In 533, when Christ’s birth replaced the founding date of Rome as the basis for calculating years according to the Western calendar, the monks who introduced the new convention miscalculated Christ’s birth. It is now accepted that he was born in 4 B.C. On that basis, a full two thousand years since his birth were completed sometime in 1997. Hence Carl Jung’s apparently odd launch date for the start of a New Age.

你可能想笑，但我们并不鄙视或否定对历史的直觉理解。尽管我们的论证是基于逻辑而非幻想，但我们对人类意识的预言能力感到敬畏。它一次又一次地挽救了疯子、通灵者和圣人的幻想。2000 年的转变也可能如此。西方人想象中早已确定的日期似乎是一个转折点，至少有一半证实了历史有命运。我们无法解释为什么会这样，但我们确信事实确实如此。

Giggle if you will, but we do not despise or dismiss intuitive understandings of history. Although our argument is grounded in logic, not in reveries, we are awed by the prophetic power of human consciousness. Time after time, it redeems the visions of madmen, psychics, and saints. So it may be with the transformation of the year 2000. The date that has long been fixed in the imagination of the West looks to be the inflection point that at least half confirms that history has a destiny. We cannot explain why this should be, but nonetheless we are convinced that it is so.

我们的直觉是，历史有命运，自由意志和决定论是同一现象的两个版本。构成历史的人类互动表现得好像是由某种命运决定的。就像电子等离子体（一种密集的电子气体）表现为一个复杂系统一样，人类也是如此。电子个体运动的自由与高度组织化的集体行为相兼容。正如大卫·玻姆 (David Bohm) 谈到电子等离子体时所说，人类历史是“一个高度组织化的系统，表现为一个整体”。

Our intuition is that history has a destiny, and that free will and determinism are two versions of the same phenomenon. The human interactions that form history behave as though they were informed by a kind of destiny. Just as an electron plasma, a dense gas of electrons, behaves as a complex system, so do human beings. The freedom of individual movement by the electrons turns out to be compatible with highly organized collective behavior. As David Bohm said of an electron plasma, human history is “a highly organized system which behaves as a whole.”

理解世界运作的方式意味着要形成一种现实的直觉，即人类社会如何遵循自然过程的数学规律。现实是非线性的。但大多数人的期望并非如此。要理解变化的动态，你必须认识到人类社会与自然界其他复杂系统一样，具有周期性和不连续性的特征。这意味着历史的某些特征有重复的趋势，而最重要的变化发生时可能是突然的，而不是渐进的。

Understanding the way the world works means developing a realistic intuition of the way that human society obeys the mathematics of natural processes. Reality is nonlinear. But most people’s expectations are not. To understand the dynamics of change, you have to recognize that human society, like other complex systems in nature, is characterized by cycles and discontinuities. That means certain features of history have a tendency to repeat themselves, and the most important changes, when they occur, may be abrupt rather than gradual.

在贯穿人类生活的循环中，一个神秘的五百年周期似乎标志着西方文明史上的重大转折点。随着 2000 年的临近，我们被一个奇怪的事实所困扰：每个世纪的最后十年（可被五整除）都标志着西方文明的一次深刻转变，一种死亡与重生的模式标志着就像死亡和出生决定了人类世代的循环一样，社会组织的新阶段也开始出现。至少从公元前500 年开始，情况就一直如此，当时希腊民主制度随着克里斯提尼于公元前 508年进行的宪法改革而出现。接下来的五个世纪是古代经济的增长和强化时期，公元前4 年基督诞生时达到顶峰。这也是古代经济最繁荣的时期，当时利率达到了现代时期之前的最低水平。

Among the cycles that permeate human life, a mysterious five-hundred-year cycle appears to mark major turning points in the history of Western civilization. As the year 2000 approaches, we are haunted by the strange fact that the final decade of each century divisible by five has marked a profound transition in Western civilization, a pattern of death and rebirth that marks new phases of social organization in much the way that death and birth delineate the cycle of human generations. This has been true since at least 500 B.C., when Greek democracy emerged with the constitutional reforms of Cleisthenes in 508 B.C. The following five centuries were a period of growth and intensification of the ancient economy, culminating in the birth of Christ in 4 B.C. This was also the time of the greatest prosperity of the ancient economy, when interest rates reached their lowest level prior to the modern period.

在接下来的五个世纪里，罗马的繁荣逐渐消退，并最终于公元 5 世纪末崩溃。威廉·普莱费尔 (William Playfair) 的总结值得重复一遍：“罗马的辉煌顶峰……将出现在基督诞生之时，也就是奥古斯都统治时期，并以同样的方式逐渐衰落，直到公元 490 年。” ²²正是在那时，最后的军团解散了，西方世界陷入了黑暗时代。

The next five centuries saw a gradual winding down of prosperity, leading to the collapse of the Roman Empire late in the fifth century A.D. William Playfair’s summary is worth repeating: “When Rome was at its highest pitch of greatness … will be seen to be at the birth of Christ, that is, during the reign of Augustus, and by the same means it will be found declining gradually till the year 490.”²² It was then that the last legions dissolved, and the Western world sank into the Dark Ages.

在接下来的五个世纪里，经济萎缩，长途贸易陷入停滞，城市人口减少，货币从流通中消失，艺术和文学几乎消失。随着西罗马帝国的崩溃，有效法律的消失导致了更为原始的纠纷解决方式的出现。血仇在五世纪末开始变得重要。第一次有记录的神判审判事件恰好发生在公元 500 年。

During the following five centuries, the economy withered, long-distance trade ground to a halt, cities were depopulated, money vanished from circulation, and art and literacy almost disappeared. The disappearance of effective law with the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West led to the emergence of more primitive arrangements for settling disputes. The blood feud began to be significant at the end of the fifth century. The first recorded incident of trial by ordeal occurred precisely in the year 500.

一千年前，十世纪的最后十年再次见证了“社会和经济体系的巨大动荡”。封建革命也许是这些转变中最不为人所知的，它开始于经济和政治极度动荡的时期。巴黎大学中世纪史教授盖伊·博伊斯在《一千年的变革》一书中声称，十世纪末的这次断裂导致古代制度残余的彻底崩溃，以及从无政府状态中出现的新事物——封建制度。23^用拉乌尔·格莱伯的话来说，“据说整个世界一致摆脱了古代的破烂。” ²⁴突然出现的新制度适应了经济增长的缓慢复苏。现在被称为中世纪的五个世纪见证了货币和国际贸易的重生，以及算术、识字和时间意识的重新发现。

Once again, a thousand years ago, the final decade of the tenth century witnessed another “tremendous upheaval in social and economic systems.” Perhaps the least known of these transitions, the feudal revolution, began at a time of utter economic and political turmoil. In The Transformation of the Year One Thousand, Guy Bois, a professor of medieval history at the University of Paris, claims that this rupture at the end of the tenth century involved the complete collapse of the remnants of ancient institutions, and the emergence of something new out of the anarchy—feudalism.²³ In the words of Raoul Glaber, “It was said that the whole world, with one accord, shook off the tatters of antiquity.”²⁴ The new system that suddenly emerged accommodated the slow revival of economic growth. The five centuries now known as the Middle Ages saw a rebirth of money and international trade, along with the rediscovery of arithmetic, literacy, and time awareness.

然后，在十五世纪的最后十年，又出现了一个转折点。正是在那时，欧洲摆脱了黑死病造成的人口短缺，并几乎立即开始统治世界其他地区。“火药革命”、“文艺复兴”和“宗教改革”是开启现代时代的这一转变的不同方面的名称。查理八世带着新的青铜大炮入侵意大利，一声巨响宣告了这一转折点的到来。它开启了哥伦布于 1492 年航行至美洲，这是人类历史上最大规模的经济增长。它推动了物理学和天文学的变革，并导致了现代科学的诞生。它的思想也随着印刷机的新技术而广为传播。

Then, in the final decade of the fifteenth century, there was yet another turning point. It was then that Europe emerged from the demographic deficit caused by the Black Death and almost immediately began to assert dominion over the rest of the globe. The “Gunpowder Revolution,” the “Renaissance,” and the “Reformation” are names given to different aspects of this transition that ushered in the Modern Age. It was announced with a bang when Charles VIII invaded Italy with new bronze cannon. It involved an opening to the world, epitomized by Columbus sailing to America in 1492. This opening to the New World launched a push toward the most dramatic economic growth in the experience of humanity. It involved a transformation of physics and astronomy that led to the creation of modern science. And its ideas were disseminated widely with the new technology of the printing press.

现在，我们正处在又一个千禧年变革的门槛上。从工业时代继承下来的大型指挥和控制系统可能会在千禧年的午夜钟声敲响时像单马车一样崩溃。然而，无论千年虫逻辑炸弹是否会立即导致工业社会崩溃，它的日子都屈指可数了。我们预计信息社会的出现将彻底改变世界，本书将以这些方式来解释。你完全有理由对此表示怀疑，因为没有一个在一千年内只重复两次的周期显示出足够多的迭代次数以具有统计意义。事实上，经济学家们对更短的周期持怀疑态度，他们要求提供更多统计上令人满意的证据。“丹尼斯·罗伯逊教授曾经写道，我们最好等上几个世纪才能确定”四年和八到十年的贸易周期的存在。25^按照这个标准，罗伯逊教授必须暂停判断大约三万年，才能确定五百年的周期不是统计上的侥幸。我们不再固执己见，而是更愿意接受暗示。我们认识到现实模式比大多数经济学家的静态和线性均衡模型更为复杂。

Now we sit at the threshold of another millennial transformation. The large command and control systems inherited from the Industrial Era may break down like the one-horse shay on the stroke of the millennial midnight. Yet whether or not the Y2K logic bomb precipitates an immediate collapse of industrial society, its days are numbered. We expect the advent of the Information Society to utterly transform the world, in ways that this book is meant to explain. You would be perfectly within your rights to doubt this, since no cycle that repeats itself only twice in a millennium has demonstrated enough iterations to be statistically significant. Indeed, even much shorter cycles have been viewed skeptically by economists demanding more statistically satisfying proof. “Professor Dennis Robertson once wrote that we had better wait a few centuries before being sure” about the existence of four-year and eight- to ten-year trade cycles.²⁵ By that standard, Professor Robertson would have to suspend judgment for about thirty thousand years to be sure that the five-hundred-year cycle is not a statistical fluke. We are less dogmatic, or more willing to take a hint. We recognize that the patterns of reality are more complex than the static- and linear-equilibrium models of most economists.

我们相信，2000 年的到来不仅仅是在无限的时间序列上又一次方便的划分。我们相信，它将成为旧世界与即将到来的新世界之间的一个转折点。工业时代正在迅速消亡，具有讽刺意味的是，它的消亡可能因为早期计算机内存非常昂贵而加速，这促使人们广泛采用两位数的日期字段。当 Hallerith 打孔卡只能容纳 80 个字符时，缩写日期似乎是明智之举。然而，与早期程序员的预期相反，他们对日期字段的缩写一直持续了四十年，直到千禧年末，它成为了一颗意外的逻辑炸弹，可能摧毁工业社会的很大一部分。美国政府管理和预算办公室在 1997 年 2 月 7 日发布的一份报告《让联邦计算机为 2000 年做好准备》中描述了这个问题。管理预算办公室对计算机的结论是：“除非对它们进行维修或更换，否则它们将在本世纪初以三种方式之一出现故障：它们将拒绝合法的输入，或者它们将计算错误的结果，或者它们根本无法运行。”这三种结果结合起来可能会使工业社会陷入瘫痪。无论如何，其大规模生产技术注定会被新的小型化技术所取代。短期危机只会加速过程。随着新信息技术的出现，出现了一门新的非线性动力学科学，它得出的惊人结论仅仅是一些尚未编织成全面世界观的线索。我们生活在计算机时代，但我们的梦想仍在织机上编织。我们继续以工业主义的隐喻和思想为生。我们还没有用奇异吸引子来想象世界。我们的政治仍然跨越左右翼之间的工业鸿沟，就像亚当·斯密和卡尔·马克思等思想家所描绘的那样，他们在几乎所有现在活着的人出生前就去世了。^二、工业世界观融合了工业科学的运作原理，仍然是受过教育的“常识”直觉。我们的论点是，随着世界的变化，工业时代的“常识”将不再适用于许多领域。

We believe that the coming of the year 2000 marks more than another convenient division along an endless continuum of time. We believe it will be an inflection point between the Old World and a New World to come. The Industrial Age is rapidly passing, and its demise may, ironically, be accelerated by the fact that early computer memory was so expensive that it encouraged the widespread adoption of two-digit date fields. When Hallerith punch cards could accommodate only eighty characters each, abbreviating dates seemed a prudent thing to do. Contrary to the expectations of the early programmers, however, their abbreviation of the date field endured four decades until the end of the millennium as an accidental logic bomb that could destroy a large part of Industrial society. The U.S. government’s Office of Management and Budget described the problem in “Getting Federal Computers Ready for 2000,” a report dated February 7, 1997. The OMB concludes of computers: “Unless they are fixed or replaced, they will fail at the turn of the century in one of three ways: they will reject legitimate entries, or they will compute erroneous results, or they simply will not run.” These three outcomes in combination could cripple Industrial society. Its technology of mass production is destined to be eclipsed by a new technology of miniaturization in any event. A near-term crisis will merely accelerate the process. With the new information technology has come a new science of nonlinear dynamics, one whose startling conclusions are mere strands that have yet to be woven together into a comprehensive worldview. We live in the time of the computer, but our dreams are still spun on the loom. We continue to live by the metaphors and thoughts of industrialism. We don’t yet imagine the world in terms of strange attractors. Our politics still straddles the industrial divide between right and left, as mapped by thinkers like Adam Smith and Karl Marx, who died before almost everyone now living was born.^II The industrial worldview, incorporating the operating principles of industrial science, is still the “commonsense” intuition of educated opinion. It is our thesis that the “common sense” of the Industrial Age will no longer apply to many areas as the world is transformed.

1911 年，奥斯瓦尔德·斯宾格勒 (Oswald Spengler) 突然预感到世界大战即将爆发，西方“将走向衰落”，八十五年之后，我们也看到“历史的阶段性变化正在发生……就在几百年前注定的时刻”。26^和斯宾格勒一样，我们看到西方文明即将走向衰落，随之而来的是自哥伦布向西航行，开辟新大陆以来，在过去五个世纪中一直占主导地位的世界秩序的崩溃。然而，与斯宾格勒不同的是，我们看到西方文明的新阶段将在未来的一千年中诞生。

More than eighty-five years after the day in 1911 when Oswald Spengler was seized with an intuition of a coming world war and “the decline of the West,” we, too, see “a historical change of phase occurring… at the point preordained for it hundreds of years ago.”²⁶ Like Spengler, we see the impending death of Western civilization, and with it the collapse of the world order that has predominated these past five centuries, ever since Columbus sailed west to open contact with the New World. Yet unlike Spengler we see the birth of a new stage in Western civilization in the coming millennium.

一、“官僚集团”是指统治前苏联和其他国营经济体的根深蒂固的精英阶层。

I. Nomenklaturas are the entrenched elites that ruled the former Soviet Union and other state-run economies.

二、亚当·斯密于1790年去世，卡尔·马克思于1883年去世。

II. Adam Smith died in 1790, Karl Marx in 1883.

第二章历史视角下的超级政治转型

CHAPTER 2 MEGAPOLITICAL TRANSFORMATIONS IN HISTORIC PERSPECTIVE

“在历史中，就像在自然界中一样，生与死是平衡的。” ¹

—约翰·休伊津加

“In history, as in nature, birth and death are equally balanced.”¹

—JOHAN HUIZINGA

现代世界的衰落​​​​

THE WANING OF THE MODERN WORLD

在我们看来，你们正在见证现代时代的衰落。这是由一种无情但隐藏的逻辑推动的发展。比我们通常理解的、比 CNN 和报纸告诉我们的还要多，下一个千年将不再是“现代的”。我们这样说并不是暗示你们将面临一个野蛮或落后的未来，尽管这是可能的，而是要强调现在开启的历史舞台将与你们出生时的舞台有质的不同。

In our view, you are witnessing nothing less than the waning of the Modern Age. It is a development driven by a ruthless but hidden logic. More than we commonly understand, more than CNN and the newspapers tell us, the next millennium will no longer be “modern.” We say this not to imply that you face a savage or backward future, although that is possible, but to emphasize that the stage of history now opening will be qualitatively different from that into which you were born.

新的事物即将来临。正如农业社会与狩猎采集社会在性质上截然不同，工业社会与封建或自耕农农业体系截然不同一样，即将到来的新世界也将与以往任何事物截然不同。

Something new is coming. Just as farming societies differed in kind from hunting-and-gathering bands, and industrial societies differed radically from feudal or yeoman agricultural systems, so the New World to come will mark a radical departure from anything seen before.

在新千年，经济和政治生活将不再像现代那样在民族国家的统治下大规模组织起来。给你带来世界大战、流水线、社会保障、所得税、除臭剂和烤箱的文明正在消亡。除臭剂和烤箱可能会幸存下来。其他的则不会。就像一位古代的、曾经的伟人一样，民族国家的未来只用几年、几天来计算，而不再是用几个世纪、几十年来计算。

In the new millennium, economic and political life will no longer be organized on a gigantic scale under the domination of the nation-state as it was during the modern centuries. The civilization that brought you world war, the assembly line, social security, income tax, deodorant, and the toaster oven is dying. Deodorant and the toaster oven may survive. The others won’t. Like an ancient and once mighty man, the nation-state has a future numbered in years and days, and no longer in centuries and decades.

政府已经丧失了大部分的监管和强制权力。共产主义的垮台标志着长达五个世纪的漫长周期的结束，在此期间，权力压倒了政府组织的效率。在那个时代，暴力的回报很高，而且还在不断上升。现在情况已不复存在。世界历史层面的阶段性转变已经开始。事实上，未来的吉本将在下一个千年里记录曾经现代的衰落和衰落，他可能会宣称，当你读到这本书时，现代时代已经结束了。回首往事，他可能会像我们一样说，现代时代随着 1989 年柏林墙的倒塌而结束。或者随着 1991 年苏联的解体而结束。这两个日期都可能成为文明演变的决定性事件，即我们现在所知的现代时代的终结。

Governments have already lost much of their power to regulate and compel. The collapse of Communism marked the end of a long cycle of five centuries during which magnitude of power overwhelmed efficiency in the organization of government. It was a time when the returns to violence were high and rising. They no longer are. A phase transition of world-historic dimensions has already begun. Indeed, the future Gibbon who chronicles the decline and fall of the once-Modern Age in the next millennium may declare that it had already ended by the time you read this book. Looking back, he may say, as we do, that it ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Or with the death of the Soviet Union in 1991. Either date could come to stand as a defining event in the evolution of civilization, the end of what we now know as the Modern Age.

人类发展的第四个阶段即将到来，也许最难以预测的特征就是它将被冠以什么新名称。你可以称之为“后现代”。你可以称之为“网络社会”或“信息时代”。或者你也可以自己想个名字。没有人知道什么概念会把这个绰号粘到历史的下一个阶段上。

The fourth stage of human development is coming, and perhaps its least predictable feature is the new name under which it will be known. Call it “Post-Modern.” Call it the “Cyber Society” or the “Information Age.” Or make up your own name. No one knows what conceptual glue will stick a nickname to the next phase of history.

我们甚至不知道刚刚结束的五百年历史是否会继续被认为是“现代”。如果未来的历史学家对词源有所了解，就不会这样认为。一个更具描述性的标题可能是“国家时代”或“暴力时代”。但这样的名称超出了目前定义历史时代的时间范围。根据牛津英语词典， “现代”的意思是“与遥远的过去不同，与现在和最近有关……在历史用法中通常适用于（与古代和中世纪相反）中世纪之后的时代。” ²

We do not even know that the five-hundred-year stretch of history just ending will continue to be thought of as “modern.” If future historians know anything about word derivations, it will not be. A more descriptive title might be “The Age of the State” or “The Age of Violence.” But such a name would fall outside the temporal spectrum that currently defines the epochs of history. “Modern,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary, means “pertaining to the present and recent times, as distinguished from the remote past.… In historical use commonly applied (in contradiction to ancient and medieval) to the time subsequent to the MIDDLE AGES.”²

西方人只有在意识到中世纪已经结束时，才有意识地认为自己是“现代”的。1500 年之前，没有人认为封建时代是西方文明的“中间”时期。原因显而易见：在一个时代可以合理地被视为夹在另外两个历史时代的“中间”之前，它必须已经结束了。生活在封建时代的人们不可能想象自己生活在古代文明和现代文明之间的中间地带，直到他们意识到中世纪不仅已经结束，而且中世纪文明与黑暗时代或古代文明有着巨大的差异^。3

Western people consciously thought of themselves as “modern” only when they came to understand that the medieval period was over. Before 1500, no one had ever thought of the feudal centuries as a “middle” period in Western civilization. The reason is obvious upon reflection: before an age can reasonably be seen as sandwiched in the “middle” of two other historic epochs, it must have already come to an end. Those living during the feudal centuries could not have imagined themselves as living in a halfway house between antiquity and modern civilization until it dawned on them not just that the medieval period was over, but also that medieval civilization differed dramatically from that of the Dark Ages or antiquity.³

人类文化存在盲点。我们没有词汇来描述生命最大边界上的范式变化，尤其是发生在我们周围的变化。尽管自摩西时代以来发生了许多戏剧性的变化，但只有少数异教徒费心去思考关于从一个文明阶段到另一个文明阶段的转变实际上是如何展开的。

Human cultures have blind spots. We have no vocabulary to describe paradigm changes in the largest boundaries of life, especially those happening around us. Notwithstanding the many dramatic changes that have unfolded since the time of Moses, only a few heretics have bothered to think about how the transitions from one phase of civilization to another actually unfold.

这些灾难是如何引发的？它们有什么共同点？哪些模式可以帮助你判断灾难何时开始、何时结束？英国或美国何时会灭亡？对于这些问题，你很难找到常规答案。

How are they triggered? What do they have in common? What patterns can help you tell when they begin and know when they are over? When will Great Britain or the United States come to an end? These are questions for which you would be hard-pressed to find conventional answers.

预见的禁忌

The Taboo on Foresight

从现有体系的“外部”视角看问题，就好比舞台工作人员试图强行与戏剧角色对话。这违反了有助于维持体系运转的惯例。每一种社会秩序都包含着一项关键禁忌，即生活在其中的人们不应该考虑它将如何结束，以及在取而代之的新体系中哪些规则会占上风。隐含地，任何现有的体系都是最后一个或唯一的体系。这并不是直言不讳。很少有读过历史书的人会认为，如果这种假设被明确表达出来，那么这种假设是现实的。尽管如此，这是统治世界的惯例。每一个社会体系，无论它对权力的依附有多强或多弱，都假装它的规则永远不会被取代。它们是最终决定。或者可能是唯一的决定。原始人认为他们的方式是组织生活的唯一可能方式。更经济复杂、具有历史感的体系通常会将自己置于历史的顶峰。不管他们是中国皇帝宫廷里的高官，斯大林统治下的克里姆林宫里的马克思主义权贵，还是华盛顿的众议院议员，当权者要么根本不考虑历史，要么将自己置于历史的巅峰，比之前的每一个人都优越，是未来一切事物的先锋。

To see “outside” an existing system is like being a stagehand trying to force a dialogue with a character in a play. It breaches a convention that helps keep the system functioning. Every social order incorporates among its key taboos the notion that people living in it should not think about how it will end and what rules may prevail in the new system that takes its place. Implicitly, whatever system exists is the last or the only system that will ever exist. Not that this is so baldly stated. Few who have ever read a history book would find such an assumption realistic if it was articulated. Nonetheless, that is the convention that rules the world. Every social system, however strongly or weakly it clings to power, pretends that its rules will never be superseded. They are the last word. Or perhaps the only word. Primitives assume that theirs is the only possible way of organizing life. More economically complicated systems that incorporate a sense of history usually place themselves at its apex. Whether they are Chinese mandarins in the court of the emperor, the Marxist nomenklatura in Stalin’s Kremlin, or members of the House of Representatives in Washington, the powers-that-be either imagine no history at all or place themselves at the pinnacle of history, in a superior position compared to everyone who came before, and the vanguard of anything to come.

出于实际原因，这是正确的。一个体系即将走向终结的迹象越明显，人们就越不愿意遵守其法律。因此，任何社会组织都会倾向于阻止或淡化预测其灭亡的分析。仅这一点就有助于确保历史上的重大转变很少在发生时被发现。如果你对未来一无所知，那么你可以放心，传统思想家既不会欢迎也不会宣传剧烈的变化。

This is true for practical reasons. The more apparent it is that a system is nearing an end, the more reluctant people will be to adhere to its laws. Any social organization will therefore tend to discourage or play down analyses that anticipate its demise. This alone helps ensure that history’s great transitions are seldom spotted as they happen. If you know nothing else about the future, you can rest assured that dramatic changes will be neither welcomed nor advertised by conventional thinkers.

你不能依赖传统的信息来源来客观及时地警告你世界正在如何变化以及变化的原因。如果你想了解目前正在发生的重大转变，你别无选择，只能自己去弄清楚。

You cannot depend upon conventional information sources to give you an objective and timely warning about how the world is changing and why. If you wish to understand the great transition now under way, you have little choice but to figure it out for yourself.

超越显而易见

Beyond the Obvious

这意味着要透过显而易见的东西来看问题。记录显示，即使是事后看来无可否认的转变，也可能在几十年甚至几个世纪后才被承认。想想罗马的陷落。它可能是公元一千年中最重要的历史发展。然而，在罗马灭亡很久之后，它幸存下来的虚构故事却被公之于众，就像列宁的防腐尸体一样。任何依靠官员的借口来理解“新闻”的人，直到这些信息不再重要之后很久，才会知道罗马已经陷落。

This means looking beyond the obvious. The record shows that even transitions that are undeniably real in retrospect may not be acknowledged for decades or even centuries after they happen. Consider the fall of Rome. It was probably the most important historic development in the first millennium of the Christian era. Yet long after Rome’s demise, the fiction that it survived was held out to public view, like Lenin’s embalmed corpse. No one who depended upon the pretenses of officials for his understanding of the “news” would have learned that Rome had fallen until long after that information ceased to matter.

原因不仅仅是古代世界通讯不足。如果 CNN 奇迹般地营业，在 476 年 9 月播放录像带，结果也会大致相同。当时，西方最后一位罗马皇帝罗慕路斯·奥古斯都鲁在拉文纳被捕，并被迫退休到坎帕尼亚的别墅领取养老金。即使沃尔夫·布利策在 476 年带着微型摄像机记录了这一新闻，他或任何其他人也不太可能敢将这些事件描述为罗马帝国的终结。当然，这正是后来的历史学家所说的事情。

The reason was not merely the inadequacy of communications in the ancient world. The outcome would have been much the same had CNN miraculously been in business, running its videotape in September 476. That is when the last Roman emperor in the West, Romulus Augustulus, was captured in Ravenna and forcibly retired to a villa in Campania on a pension. Even if Wolfe Blitzer had been there with minicams recording the news in 476, it is unlikely that he or anyone else would have dared to characterize those events as marking the end of the Roman Empire. That, of course, is exactly what latter historians said happened.

CNN 的编辑们可能不会批准“罗马今晚陷落”这样的头条新闻。当权者否认罗马已陷落。“新闻”贩子很少会为了争议而损害自己的利润。他们可能有党派之分。他们甚至可能非常离谱。但他们很少报道能让订阅者取消订阅并逃之夭夭的结论。这就是为什么即使技术上可行，也很少有人报道罗马的陷落。专家们会站出来说，谈论罗马的陷落是荒谬的。否则会对生意不利，也许还会对报道者的健康不利。五世纪末罗马的当权者是野蛮人，他们否认罗马已经陷落。

CNN editors probably would not have approved a headline story saying “Rome fell this evening.” The powers-that-be denied that Rome had fallen. Peddlers of “news” seldom are partisans of controversy in ways that would undermine their own profits. They may be partisan. They may even be outrageously so. But they seldom report conclusions that would convince subscribers to cancel their subscriptions and head for the hills. Which is why few would have reported the fall of Rome even if it had been technologically possible. Experts would have come forth to say that it was ridiculous to speak of Rome falling. To have said otherwise would have been bad for business and, perhaps, bad for the health of those doing the reporting. The powers in late-fifth-century Rome were barbarians, and they denied that Rome had fallen.

但这不仅仅是当局说“不要报告这件事，否则我们会杀了你”的案例。问题的一部分在于，到 5 世纪后期，罗马已经如此堕落，以至于它的“衰落”并没有真正引起大多数经历过它的人的注意。事实上，直到一代人之后，马塞利努斯伯爵才首次提出“西罗马帝国随着奥古斯都的灭亡而灭亡”。4^又过了几十年，甚至几个世纪，人们才普遍承认西罗马帝国已不复存在。查理曼大帝当然相信他是公元 800 年的合法罗马皇帝。

But it was not merely a case of authorities’ saying, “Don’t report this or we will kill you.” Part of the problem was that Rome was already so degenerate by the later decades of the fifth century that its “fall” genuinely eluded the notice of most people who lived through it. In fact, it was a generation later before Count Marcellinus first suggested that “The Western Roman Empire perished with this Augustulus.”⁴ Many more decades passed, perhaps centuries, before there was a common acknowledgment that the Roman Empire in the West no longer existed. Certainly Charlemagne believed that he was a legitimate Roman emperor in the year 800.

重点不在于查理曼大帝和所有以传统思维思考的人476 年之后，关于罗马帝国的描述都是愚蠢的。恰恰相反。社会发展的表征往往是模棱两可的。当主流机构的力量被用来强化一个方便的结论时，即使这个结论很大程度上是基于伪装的，也只有性格坚强、观点坚定的人敢于反驳它。如果你试着把自己放在 5 世纪末罗马人的位置，很容易想象得出什么都没有改变的结论是多么诱人。这当然是乐观的结论。否则可能会令人恐惧。既然有一个令人放心的结论，为什么还要得出一个可怕的结论呢？

The point is not that Charlemagne and all who thought in conventional terms about the Roman Empire after 476 were fools. To the contrary. The characterization of social developments is frequently ambiguous. When the power of predominant institutions is brought into the bargain to reinforce a convenient conclusion, even one based largely on pretense, only someone of strong character and strong opinions would dare contradict it. If you try to put yourself in the position of a Roman of the late fifth century, it is easy to imagine how tempting it would have been to conclude that nothing had changed. That certainly was the optimistic conclusion. To have thought otherwise might have been frightening. And why come to a frightening conclusion when a reassuring one was at hand?

毕竟，可以假设一切照旧。过去确实如此。罗马军队，特别是边境驻军，已经被野蛮化了几个世纪。5^到了公元三世纪，军队宣布新皇帝已成为常规做法。到了四世纪，甚至连军官都德国化了，而且经常是文盲。6 在罗慕路斯·奥古斯都被赶下王位之前，曾发生过许多次皇帝被暴力推翻的事件。对^他的同时代人来说，他的离去可能与混乱时期的许多其他动乱没有什么不同。他带着养老金离开了。即使在被谋杀前很短的一段时间里，他仍然收到了养老金，这一事实本身就证明了这个制度仍然存在。对于一个乐观主义者来说，废黜罗慕路斯·奥古斯都的奥多亚塞统一了帝国，而不是摧毁了帝国。作为阿提拉的助手埃德孔的儿子，奥多亚塞是个聪明人。他没有宣布自己是皇帝。相反，他召集了参议院，说服那些过于容易受人影响的议员，让他们把皇帝的职位和整个帝国的统治权交给远在拜占庭的东方皇帝芝诺。奥多亚塞只是作为芝诺的贵族来统治意大利。

After all, a case could have been made that business would continue as usual. It had in the past. The Roman army, and particularly the frontier garrisons, had been barbarized for centuries.⁵ By the third century, it had become regular practice for the army to proclaim a new emperor. By the fourth century, even officers were Germanized and frequently illiterate.⁶ There had been many violent overthrows of emperors before Romulus Augustulus was removed from the throne. His departure might have seemed no different to his contemporaries than many other upheavals in a chaotic time. And he was sent packing with a pension. The very fact that he received a pension, even for a brief period before he was murdered, was a reassurance that the system survived. To an optimist, Odoacer, who deposed Romulus Augustulus, reunified rather than destroyed the empire. A son of Attila’s sidekick Edecon, Odoacer was a clever man. He did not proclaim himself emperor. Instead, he convened the Senate and prevailed upon its too-suggestible members that they offer the emperorship and thus sovereignty over the whole empire to Zeno, the Eastern emperor in faraway Byzantium. Odoacer was merely to be Zeno’s patricius to govern Italy.

正如威尔·杜兰特在《文明的故事》中所写，这些变化似乎并不是“罗马的衰落”，而只是“国家舞台表面上微不足道的变化”。7^当罗马衰落时，奥多亚塞说罗马经久不衰。他和几乎所有其他人一样，热衷于假装什么都没有改变。他们知道“罗马的辉煌”远比取而代之的野蛮要好。甚至野蛮人也这么认为。正如 CW 普雷维特-奥尔顿在《简明剑桥中世纪史》中所写，公元 5 世纪末，“皇帝被野蛮的德国国王取代”，这是一个“持续的虚假”时期^。8

As Will Durant wrote in The Story of Civilization, these changes did not appear to be the “fall of Rome” but merely “negligible shifts on the surface of the national scene.”⁷ When Rome fell, Odoacer said that Rome endured. He, along with almost everyone else, was keen to pretend that nothing had changed. They knew that “the glory that was Rome” was far better than the barbarism that was taking its place. Even the barbarians thought so. As C. W. Previte-Orton wrote in The Shorter Cambridge Medieval History, the end of the fifth century, when “the Emperors had been replaced by barbaric German kings,” was a time of “persistent make-believe.”⁸

“持续的虚假”

“Persistent Make-Believe”

这种“虚构”意味着保留旧制度的外表，即使其本质已被“野蛮行径扭曲”。9^当最后一位皇帝被一位蛮族“副官”的职位。元老院仍然开会。“禁卫军长官和其他高级职位继续存在，由杰出的罗马人担任。” ¹⁰执政官的任期仍为一年。“罗马民政完好无损。” ¹¹事实上，在某些方面，它一直完好无损，直到十世纪末封建主义诞生。在公共场合，仍然使用旧的帝国徽章。基督教仍然是国教。蛮族仍然假装效忠君士坦丁堡的东方皇帝和罗马法的传统。事实上，用杜兰特的话来说，“在西方，伟大的帝国不复存在。” ¹²

This “make-believe” involved the preservation of the façade of the old system, even as its essence was “deformed by barbarism.”⁹ The old forms of government remained the same when the last emperor was replaced by a barbarian “lieutenant.” The Senate still met. “The praetorian prefecture and other high offices continued, and were held by eminent Romans.”¹⁰ Consuls were still nominated for a year. “The Roman civil administration survived intact.”¹¹ Indeed, in some ways it remained intact until the birth of feudalism at the end of the tenth century. On public occasions, the old imperial insignia was still employed. Christianity was still the state religion. The barbarians still pretended to owe fealty to the Eastern emperor in Constantinople, and to the traditions of Roman law. In fact, in Durant’s words, “in the West the great Empire was no more.”¹²

所以呢？

So What?

当你思考当今世界的状况时，罗马城陷落这个遥远的例子具有多种意义。大多数关于未来的书实际上都是关于现在的书。我们试图弥补这一缺陷，首先将这本关于未来的书变成一本关于过去的书。我们认为，如果我们用过去的真实例子来说明关于暴力逻辑的重要大政治观点，你很可能会更好地了解未来会发生什么。历史是一位了不起的老师。它所讲述的故事比我们所能编造的任何故事都更有趣。其中许多更有趣的故事与罗马城陷落有关。它们记录了重要的教训，这些教训可能与你在信息时代的未来有关。

The faraway example of the fall of Rome is relevant for a number of reasons as you contemplate conditions in the world today. Most books about the future are really books about the present. We have sought to remedy that defect by making this book about the future first of all a book about the past. We think that you are likely to draw a better perspective about what the future has in store if we illustrate important megapolitical points about the logic of violence with real examples from the past. History is an amazing teacher. The stories it has to tell are more interesting than any we could make up. And many of the more interesting relate to the fall of Rome. They document important lessons that could be relevant to your future in the Information Age.

首先，罗马的衰落是历史上政府规模崩溃时重大转型中发生的最生动的例子之一。公元 1000 年的转型也涉及中央权力的崩溃，并且以增加经济活动的复杂性和范围的方式实现。15 世纪末的火药革命涉及机构的重大变革，这些变革倾向于扩大而不是缩小治理规模。今天，西方的超级政治条件一千年来首次削弱和摧毁了政府、企业集团、工会和许多其他大规模运作的机构。

First of all, the fall of Rome is one of history’s more vivid examples of what happened in a major transition when the scale of government was collapsing. The transitions of the year 1000 also involved the collapse of central authority, and did so in a way that increased the complexity and scope of economic activity. The Gunpowder Revolution at the end of the fifteenth century involved major changes in institutions that tended to raise rather than shrink the scale of governance. Today, for the first time in a thousand years, megapolitical conditions in the West are undermining and destroying governments, corporate conglomerates, labor unions, and many other institutions that operate on a large scale.

当然，罗马帝国末期治理规模的崩溃与信息时代到来时普遍存在的原因大不相同。罗马衰落的部分原因很简单，就是它的扩张超出了暴力经济能够维持的规模。驻扎在帝国遥远边境的成本超过了古代农业经济所能支持的经济优势。为军事行动提供资金所需的税收和监管负担超过了经济的承载能力。腐败成为普遍现象。正如历史学家拉姆齐·麦克穆伦 (Ramsay MacMullen) 记载，他们致力于追求“指挥权的非法利润”。13^他们通过敲诈民众来获取利润，四世纪的观察家西尼修斯 (Synesius) 将其描述为“和平时期的战争，一场几乎比野蛮战争还要糟糕的战争，起因于军队的纪律松懈和军官的贪婪。” ¹⁴

Of course, the collapse in the scale of governance at the end of the Roman Empire had very different causes from those prevailing now, at the advent of the Information Age. Part of the reason that Rome fell is simply that it had expanded beyond the scale at which the economies of violence could be maintained. The cost of garrisoning the empire’s far-flung borders exceeded the economic advantages that an ancient agricultural economy could support. The burden of taxation and regulation required to finance the military effort rose to exceed the carrying capacity of the economy. Corruption became endemic. A large part of the effort of military commanders, as historian Ramsay MacMullen has documented, was devoted to pursuit of “illicit profits of their command.”¹³ This they pursued by shaking down the population, what the fourth-century observer Synesius described as “the peace-time war, one almost worse than the barbarian war and arising from the military’s indiscipline and the officers’ greed.”¹⁴

导致罗马衰落的另一个重要因素是安东尼瘟疫造成的人口短缺。罗马许多地区人口的骤减显然导致了经济和军事的衰弱。今天，至少目前还没有发生过这样的事情。从长远来看，新“瘟疫”的祸害可能会加剧新千年技术退化的挑战。20 世纪人口空前的膨胀为快速变异的微寄生虫创造了一个诱人的目标。人们担心埃博拉病毒或类似病毒会入侵大都市人口，这可能是有充分理由的。但这里不是讨论人类和疾病共同进化的地方。尽管这是一个有趣的话题，但我们此时的讨论重点不是罗马衰落的原因，甚至不是当今世界是否容易受到导致罗马衰落的一些相同影响。而是关于不同的东西——即人们对历史上伟大变革的看法，或者更确切地说，人们对它们发生时的误解。

Another important contributing factor to Rome’s collapse was a demographic deficit caused by the Antonine plagues. The collapse of the Roman population in many areas obviously contributed to economic and military weakness. Nothing of that kind has happened today, at least not yet. Taking a longer view, perhaps, the scourge of new “plagues” will compound the challenges of technological devolution in the new millennium. The unprecedented bulge in human population in the twentieth century creates a tempting target for rapidly mutating microparasites. Fears about the Ebola virus, or something like it, invading metropolitan populations may be well founded. But this is not the place to consider the coevolution of humans and diseases. As interesting a topic as that is, our argument at this juncture is not about why Rome fell, or even about whether the world today is vulnerable to some of the same influences that contributed to Roman decline. It is about something different—namely, the way that history’s great transformations are perceived, or rather, misperceived as they happen.

人们总是、无处不在，在某种程度上都是保守的，小写的“c”。这意味着他们不愿意考虑废除古老的社会习俗、推翻公认的制度、藐视他们赖以生存的法律和价值观。很少有人会想到，气候、技术或其他变量的微小变化会以某种方式切断他们与父辈世界的联系。罗马人不愿意承认他们周围正在发生的变化。我们也是如此。

People are always and everywhere to some degree conservative, with a small “c.” That implies a reluctance to think in terms of dissolving venerable social conventions, overturning the accepted institutions, and defying the laws and values from which they drew their bearings. Few are inclined to imagine that apparently minor changes in climate or technology or some other variable can somehow be responsible for severing connections to the world of their fathers. The Romans were reluctant to acknowledge the changes unfolding around them. So are we.

然而，无论你是否意识到，我们都在经历历史的变迁，人们组织生活和自我保护的方式发生了深刻的转变，这种转变影响深远，必然会改变整个社会。事实上，这种变化是如此深刻，以至于要理解它几乎不需要想当然。几乎每一次，你都会被邀请相信即将到来的信息社会将与你成长的工业社会非常相似。我们对此表示怀疑。微处理将溶解砖块中的砂浆。它将如此深刻地改变暴力的逻辑，必然会改变人们组织生活和自我保护的方式。然而，人们倾向于淡化这些变化的必然性，或者争论这些变化的可取性，好像工业机构有权决定历史如何发展一样。

Yet recognize it or not, we are living through a change of historical season, a transformation in the way people organize their livelihoods and defend themselves that is so far-reaching that it will inevitably transform the whole of society. The change will be so profound, in fact, that to understand it will require taking almost nothing for granted. You will be invited at almost every turn to believe that the coming Information Societies will be very like the industrial society you grew up in. We doubt it. Microprocessing will dissolve the mortar in the bricks. It will so profoundly alter the logic of violence that it will inevitably change the way people organize their livelihoods and defend themselves. Yet the tendency will be to downplay the inevitability of these changes, or to argue about their desirability as if it were within the fiat of industrial institutions to determine how history evolves.

大幻觉

The Grand Illusion

然而，那些在很多方面比我们更了解情况的作者，却会将你引入歧途，因为他们在研究社会如何运作时过于肤浅。例如，大卫·克莱恩和丹尼尔·伯斯坦写了一本经过深入研究的书，名为《公路勇士：信息高速公路上的梦想与噩梦》。这本书充满了令人钦佩的细节，但其中许多细节都是为了论证一种幻觉，即“公民可以有意识地共同行动，塑造他们周围自发的经济和自然过程。” ¹⁵虽然这可能并不明显，但这相当于说，如果每个人都重新致力于骑士精神，封建制度可能会幸存下来。15 世纪后期的宫廷中没有人会反对这种观点。事实上，这样做是异端邪说。但它也会完全误导人，就像蛇试图将未来塞进旧皮里一样。

Authors who are in many ways better informed than we are will nevertheless lead you astray in thinking about the future because they are far too superficial in examining how societies work. For example, David Kline and Daniel Burstein have written a well-researched volume entitled Road Warriors: Dreams and Nightmares Along the Information Highway. It is full of admirable detail, but much of this detail is marshaled in arguing an illusion, the idea “that citizens can act together, consciously, to shape the spontaneous economic and natural processes going on around them.”¹⁵ Although it may not be obvious, this is equivalent to saying that feudalism might have survived if everyone had rededicated himself to chivalry. No one in a court of the late fifteenth century would have objected to such a sentiment. Indeed, it would have been heresy to do so. But it also would have been entirely misleading, an example of the snake trying to fit the future into its old skin.

变革的基本原因恰恰是那些不受有意识控制的因素。它们是改变暴力得逞条件的因素。事实上，它们与任何明显的操纵手段相距甚远，甚至不是政治充斥的世界里政治操纵的对象。从来没有人在游行示威中高喊“增加生产过程中的规模经济”。从来没有人打出横幅要求“发明一种增加步兵重要性的武器系统”。从来没有候选人承诺要“改变防范暴力的效率和规模之间的平衡”。这样的口号是荒谬的，正是因为它们的目标超出了任何人有意识影响的能力。然而，正如我们将要探讨的，这些变量决定了世界如何运作，其程度远远超过任何政治平台。

The basic causes of change are precisely those that are not subject to conscious control. They are the factors that alter the conditions under which violence pays. Indeed, they are so remote from any obvious means of manipulation that they are not even subjects of political maneuvering in a world saturated with politics. No one ever marched in a demonstration shouting, “Increase scale economies in the production process.” No banner has ever demanded, “Invent a weapons system that increases the importance of the infantry.” No candidate ever promised to “alter the balance between efficiency and magnitude in protection against violence.” Such slogans would be ridiculous, precisely because their goals are beyond the capacity of anyone to consciously affect. Yet as we will explore, these variables determine how the world works to a far greater degree than any political platform.

如果你仔细思考，就会发现历史上的重大转变很少主要由人类的愿望驱动。它们不会因为人们厌倦了一种生活方式而突然喜欢另一种生活方式而发生。稍加思考就能明白其中的原因。如果人们的想法和愿望是决定事情发生的唯一因素，那么历史上所有的突然变化都必须用与实际生活条件的变化无关的情绪波动来解释。事实上，这种情况从未发生过。只有在少数人出现医疗问题的情况下，我们才会看到情绪的随意波动，而这种波动似乎完全与任何客观原因无关。

If you think about it carefully, it should be obvious that important transitions in history seldom are driven primarily by human wishes. They do not happen because people get fed up with one way of life and suddenly prefer another. A moment’s reflection suggests why. If what people think and desire were the only determinants of what happens, then all the abrupt changes in history would have to be explained by wild mood swings unconnected to any change in the actual conditions of life. In fact, this never happens. Only in cases of medical problems affecting a few people do we see arbitrary fluctuations in mood that appear entirely divorced from any objective cause.

一般来说，大多数人不会突然决定放弃自己的生活方式，仅仅因为他们觉得这样做很有趣。没有一个觅食者会说：“我厌倦了史前时代的生活，我更喜欢农村农民的生活。”行为模式和价值观的任何决定性转变都是对生活条件实际变化的反应。至少在这个意义上，人们总是现实的。如果如果他们的观点确实发生了突然改变，这可能表明他们面临着一些不熟悉的情况：入侵、瘟疫、突然的气候变化或改变他们生计或自卫能力的技术革命。

As a rule, large numbers of people do not suddenly and all at once decide to abandon their way of life simply because they find it amusing to do so. No forager ever said, “I am tired of living in prehistoric times, I would prefer the life of a peasant in a farming village.” Any decisive swing in patterns of behavior and values is invariably a response to an actual change in the conditions of life. In this sense, at least, people are always realistic. If their views do change abruptly, it probably indicates that they have been confronted by some departure from familiar conditions: an invasion, a plague, a sudden climatic shift, or a technological revolution that alters their livelihoods or their ability to defend themselves.

历史性变革并非人类欲望的产物，它常常会打乱大多数人对稳定的渴望。变革发生时，通常会造成普遍的迷失，尤其是那些收入或社会地位下降的人。你徒劳地通过民意调查或其他情绪衡量标准来了解即将到来的大政治转型可能如何展开。

Far from being the product of human desire, decisive historic changes more often than not confound the wish of most people for stability. When change occurs, it typically causes widespread disorientation, especially among those who lose income or social status. You will look in vain at public opinion polls or other measures of mood for an understanding of how the coming megapolitical transition is likely to unfold.

缺乏远见的生活​​

LIFE WITHOUT FORESIGHT

如果我们没有察觉到周围正在发生的巨大转变，部分原因是我们不想看到。我们的觅食祖先可能同样顽固，但他们有更好的借口。一万年前，没有人能够预见农业革命的后果。事实上，除了下一顿饭在哪里找到之外，没有人能预见到更多的事情。当农业开始的时候，没有过去事件的记录来从中得出对未来的展望。甚至没有西方人认为时间可以分成有序的单位，如秒、分、时、日等，来测量年份。觅食者生活在“永恒的现在”，没有日历，实际上，根本没有书面记录。他们没有科学，也没有其他智力手段来理解他们自己的直觉之外的因果关系。说到展望未来，我们的原始祖先是盲目的。引用圣经的比喻，他们还没有吃知识的果实。

If we fail to perceive the great transition going on around us, it is partly because we do not desire to see. Our foraging forebears may have been just as obdurate, but they had a better excuse. No one ten thousand years ago could have foreseen the consequences of the Agricultural Revolution. Indeed, no one could have foreseen much of anything beyond where to find the next meal. When farming began, there was no record of past events from which to draw perspective on the future. There was not even a Western sense of time divided into orderly units, like seconds, minutes, hours, days, and so on, to measure out the years. Foragers lived in the “eternal present,” without calendars, and indeed, without written records at all. They had no science, and no other intellectual apparatus for understanding cause and effect beyond their own intuitions. When it came to looking ahead, our primeval ancestors were blind. To cite the biblical metaphor, they had not yet eaten of the fruit of knowledge.

从过去吸取教训

Learning from the Past

幸运的是，我们拥有更好的视角。过去五百代人赋予了我们祖先所缺乏的分析能力。科学和数学帮助我们解开了大自然的许多秘密，让我们对因果关系的理解比早期觅食者更接近神奇。高速计算机开发的计算算法为人类经济等复杂动态系统的运作提供了新的见解。政治经济学本身的艰苦发展虽然远非完美，但却磨练了对影响人类行为的因素的理解。其中重要的是认识到，无论何时何地，人们都倾向于对激励做出反应。并不总是像经济学家那样机械地想象，但它们确实会做出反应。成本和回报很重要。在其他条件相同的情况下，外部条件的变化会增加回报或降低某些行为的成本，从而导致更多此类行为。

Luckily, we have a better vantage point. The past five hundred generations have given us analytic capabilities that our forebears lacked. Science and mathematics have helped unlock many of nature’s secrets, giving us an understanding of cause and effect that approaches the magical when compared to that of the early foragers. Computational algorithms developed as a result of high-speed computers have shed new insights on the workings of complex, dynamic systems like the human economy. The painstaking development of political economy itself, although it falls well short of perfection, has honed understanding of the factors informing human action. Important among these is the recognition that people at all times and places tend to respond to incentives. Not always as mechanically as economists imagine, but they do respond. Costs and rewards matter. Changes in external conditions that raise the rewards or lower the costs of certain behavior will lead to more of that behavior, other things being-equal.

激励很重要

Incentives Matter

人们倾向于对成本和回报做出反应，这是预测的一个基本要素。你可以非常自信地说，如果你在街上掉下一张一百美元的钞票，很快就会有人捡起来，不管你是在纽约、墨西哥城还是莫斯科。这并不像看上去那么微不足道。它表明了为什么那些说预测是不可能的聪明人是错的。任何准确预测激励对行为影响的预测都可能是大致正确的。预期的成本和回报变化越大，隐含的预测就越不可能微不足道。

The fact that people tend to respond to costs and rewards is an essential element of forecasting. You can say with a high degree of confidence that if you drop a hundred-dollar bill on the street, someone will soon pick it up, whether you are in New York, Mexico City, or Moscow. This is not as trivial as it seems. It shows why the clever people who say that forecasting is impossible are wrong. Any forecast that accurately anticipates the impact of incentives on behavior is likely to be broadly correct. And the greater the anticipated change in costs and rewards, the less trivial the implied forecast is likely to be.

最深远的预测很可能来自于认识到不断变化的大政治变量的影响。暴力是行为的最终边界力量；因此，如果你能理解暴力的逻辑将如何变化，你就能有效地预测未来人们会在哪里丢下或捡起相当于一百美元的钞票。

The most far-reaching forecasts of all are likely to arise from recognizing the implications of shifting megapolitical variables. Violence is the ultimate boundary force on behavior; thus, if you can understand how the logic of violence will change, you can usefully predict where people will be dropping or picking up the equivalent of one-hundred-dollar bills in the future.

我们这样说并不是说你可以知道不可知的事情。我们无法告诉你如何预测彩票中奖号码或任何真正随机的事件。我们无法知道恐怖分子何时或是否会在曼哈顿引爆原子弹。或者一颗小行星是否会袭击沙特阿拉伯。我们无法预测新冰河时代的到来、火山的突然喷发或新疾病的出现。可能改变历史进程的不可知事件数量巨大。但了解不可知的事情与得出已知事物的含义截然不同。如果你在远处看到一道闪电，你可以非常有信心地预测雷声即将来临。预测超级政治转型的后果需要更长的时间框架和更少的确定性联系，但这是一种类似的练习。

We do not mean by this that you can know the unknowable. We cannot tell you how to forecast winning lottery numbers or any truly random event. We have no way of knowing when or whether a terrorist will detonate an atomic blast in Manhattan. Or if an asteroid will strike Saudi Arabia. We cannot predict the coming of a new Ice Age, a sudden volcanic eruption, or the emergence of a new disease. The number of unknowable events that could alter the course of history is large. But knowing the unknowable is very different from drawing out the implications of what is already known. If you see a flash of lightning far away, you can forecast with a high degree of confidence that a thunderclap is due. Forecasting the consequences of megapolitical transitions involves much longer time frames, and less certain connections, but it is a similar kind of exercise.

变革的超级政治催化剂通常早在其后果显现之前就出现了。农业革命的全部影响花了五千年才浮出水面。从农业社会向基于制造业和化学动力的工业社会的转变则发展得更快。这花了几个世纪的时间。向信息社会的转变将发生得更快，可能在一生中就会发生。然而，即使考虑到历史的缩短，你也可以预计，现有信息技术的全部超级政治影响还需要几十年的时间才能实现。

Megapolitical catalysts for change usually appear well before their consequences manifest themselves. It took five thousand years for the full implications of the Agricultural Revolution to come to the surface. The transition from an agricultural society to an industrial society based on manufacturing and chemical power unfolded more quickly. It took centuries. The transition to the Information Society will happen more rapidly still, probably within a lifetime. Yet even allowing for the foreshortening of history, you can expect decades to pass before the full megapolitical impact of existing information technology is realized.

重大和轻微的超级政治转型

Major and Minor Megapolitical Transitions

本章分析了超级政治转型的一些共同特征。在后面的章节中，我们将更仔细地研究农业革命以及从农场到工厂的转型，这是前两次重大阶段变化中的第二次。在文明的农业阶段，有许多小型的超级政治转型，例如罗马的衰落和公元 1000 年的封建革命。随着政府的兴衰和农业战利品从一人手中转移到另一人手中，这些转型标志着权力方程的兴衰。罗马帝国统治下的庞大庄园的所有者、欧洲黑暗时代的自耕农以及封建时期的领主和农奴都吃同一块田地里的谷物。由于不同技术的累积影响、气候变化和疾病的破坏性影响，他们生活在截然不同的政府统治下。

This chapter analyzes some of the common features of megapolitical transitions. In following chapters we look more closely at the Agricultural Revolution, and the transition from farm to factory, the second of the previous great phase changes. Within the agricultural stage of civilization there were many minor megapolitical transitions such as the fall of Rome and the feudal revolution of the year 1000. These marked the waxing and waning of the power equation as governments rose and fell and the spoils of farming passed from one set of hands to another. The owners of sprawling estates under the Roman Empire, yeoman farmers in the European Dark Ages, and the lords and serfs of the feudal period all ate grain from the same fields. They lived under very different governments because of the cumulative impact of different technologies, fluctuations in climate, and the disruptive influences of disease.

我们的目的不是彻底解释所有这些变化。我们并不假装这样做，尽管我们已经勾勒出一些例子，说明不断变化的超级政治变量如何改变了过去行使权力的方式。随着超级政治波动降低和提高权力投射成本，政府规模时大时小。

Our purpose is not to thoroughly explain all of these changes. We do not pretend to do so, although we have sketched out some illustrations of the way that changing megapolitical variables have altered the way that power was exercised in the past. Governments have grown and shrunk as megapolitical fluctuations have lowered and raised the costs of projecting power.

当你试图理解信息革命时，你应该记住以下几点总结：

Here are some summary points that you should keep in mind as you seek to understand the Information Revolution:

1. 权力的大型政治基础的转变通常早于权力使用的实际革命发生。
2. A shift in the megapolitical foundations of power normally unfolds far in advance of the actual revolutions in the use of power.
3. 当重大转型开始时，收入通常都会下降，这通常是因为人口压力导致社会资源边缘化，从而使其容易陷入危机。
4. Incomes are usually falling when a major transition begins, often because a society has rendered itself crisis-prone by marginalizing resources due to population pressures.
5. 观察一个系统的“外部”通常是一种禁忌。人们常常对现有社会中的暴力逻辑视而不见；因此，他们几乎总是对这种逻辑的变化视而不见，无论是潜在的还是明显的。大政治转型很少在发生之前就被察觉到。
6. Seeing “outside” of a system is usually taboo. People are frequently blind to the logic of violence in the existing society; therefore, they are almost always blind to changes in that logic, latent or overt. Megapolitical transitions are seldom recognized before they happen.
7. 重大转变总是伴随着文化革命，并且通常会导致新旧价值观追随者之间的冲突。
8. Major transitions always involve a cultural revolution, and usually entail clashes between adherents of the old and new values.
9. 大政治转型从来都不受欢迎，因为它们会破坏辛苦获得的智力资本，并混淆既定的道德准则。它们不是出于大众的需求，而是为了应对外部条件的变化，这些变化改变了当地环境中的暴力逻辑。
10. Megapolitical transitions are never popular, because they antiquate painstakingly acquired intellectual capital and confound established moral imperatives. They are not undertaken by popular demand, but in response to changes in the external conditions that alter the logic of violence in the local setting.
11. 向新的生活组织方式或新型政府的转变最初仅限于超级政治催化剂发挥作用的地区。
12. Transitions to new ways of organizing livelihoods or new types of government are initially confined to those areas where the megapolitical catalysts are at work.
13. 除农业早期阶段外，过去的转型总是伴随着因旧体系的迷失和崩溃而导致的社会混乱和暴力加剧时期。
14. With the possible exception of the early stages of farming, past transitions have always involved periods of social chaos and heightened violence due to disorientation and breakdown of the old system.
15. 腐败、道德沦丧、效率低下似乎是一个体制末期的显著特征。
16. Corruption, moral decline, and inefficiency appear to be signal features of the final stages of a system.
17. 技术在塑造暴力逻辑方面的重要性日益增加，导致了历史进程的加速，使得每次连续的转变都比以前更缺乏适应时间。
18. The growing importance of technology in shaping the logic of violence has led to an acceleration of history, leaving each successive transition with less adaptive time than ever before.

历史加速

History Speeds Up

随着事件的发展速度比以往的变革速度快很多倍，早期了解世界将如何变化对你来说可能比过去同等时刻对你祖先的帮助大得多。即使第一批农民奇迹般地理解了耕种土地的全部政治含义，这些信息实际上也是无用的，因为在社会向新阶段过渡之前，还需要数千年的时间。

With events unfolding many times faster than during previous transformations, early understanding of how the world will change could turn out to be far more useful to you than it would have been to your ancestors at an equivalent juncture in the past. Even if the first farmers had miraculously understood the full megapolitical implications of tilling the earth, this information would have been practically useless because thousands of years were to pass before the transition to the new phase of society was complete.

如今情况并非如此。历史已经加速。正确预测新技术对超级政治影响的预测在今天可能更有用。如果我们能够将当前向信息社会过渡的影响发展到与拥有当前知识的人能够掌握过去向农场和工厂过渡的影响相同的程度，那么这些信息现在的价值应该会高出许多倍。简而言之，超级政治预测的行动范围已经缩小到其最有用的范围，在一个人的一生中。

Not so today. History has sped up. Forecasts that correctly anticipate the megapolitical implications of new technology are likely to be far more useful today. If we can develop the implications of the current transition to the Information Society to the same extent that someone with current knowledge could have grasped the implications of past transitions to farm and factory, that information should be many times more valuable now. Put simply, the action horizon for megapolitical forecasts has shrunk to its most useful range, within the span of a single lifetime.

“回顾过去几个世纪，或者即使只看现在，我们也可以清楚地看到，许多人靠使用暴力武器的特殊技能谋生，而且往往过着非常优厚的生活，他们的活动在决定如何利用稀缺资源方面发挥了很大作用。” ¹⁶

—弗雷德里克·C·莱恩

“Looking back over the centuries, or even if looking only at the present, we can clearly observe that many men have made their living, often a very good living, from their special skill in applying weapons of violence, and that their activities have had a very large part in determining what uses were made of scarce resources.”¹⁶

—FREDERIC C. LANE

我们对大政治的研究就是为了做到这一点——找出改变暴力边界的因素变化的影响。这些大政治因素在很大程度上决定了暴力发生的时间和地点暴力是有回报的。它们还有助于为市场收入分配提供信息。正如经济史学家弗雷德里克·莱恩明确指出的那样，暴力的组织和控制方式在决定“稀缺资源的用途”方面发挥着重要作用^。17

Our study of megapolitics is an attempt to do just that—to draw out the implications of the changing factors that alter the boundaries where violence is exercised. These megapolitical factors largely determine when and where violence pays. They also help inform the market distribution of income. As economic historian Frederic Lane so clearly put it, how violence is organized and controlled plays a large role in determining “what uses are made of scarce resources.”¹⁷

大都会政治中的AC速成课程

A CRASH COURSE IN MEGAPOLITICS

超级政治的概念非常强大。它有助于阐明历史上的一些重大谜团：政府如何兴起和衰落以及它们发展成何种类型的机构；战争的时机和结果；经济繁荣和衰落的模式。通过提高或降低投射权力的成本和回报，超级政治控制着人们将自己的意志强加于他人的能力。从最早的人类社会开始，情况一直如此。现在仍然如此。我们在《街头血案》和《大清算》中探讨了决定历史演变的许多重要的隐藏超级政治因素。解开超级政治变化含义的关键是了解促成使用暴力革命的因素。这些变量可以随意分为四类：地形、气候、微生物和技术。

The concept of megapolitics is a powerful one. It helps illuminate some of the major mysteries of history: how governments rise and fall and what types of institutions they become; the timing and outcome of wars; patterns of economic prosperity and decline. By raising or lowering the costs and rewards of projecting power, megapolitics governs the ability of people to impose their will on others. This has been true from the earliest human societies onward. It still is. We explored many of the important hidden megapolitical factors that determine the evolution of history in Blood in the Streets and The Great Reckoning. The key to unlocking the implications of megapolitical change is understanding the factors that precipitate revolutions in the use of violence. These variables can be somewhat arbitrarily grouped into four categories: topography, climate, microbes, and technology.

1. 地形是一个关键因素，这一点从公海上的暴力控制从未像陆地上那样被垄断这一事实可以看出。没有一个政府的法律在那里是独家适用的。这对于理解随着经济向网络空间迁移，暴力和保护的组织将如何演变至关重要。

1. Topography is a crucial factor, as evidenced by the fact that control of violence on the open seas has never been monopolized as it has on land. No government’s laws have ever exclusively applied there. This is a matter of the utmost importance in understanding how the organization of violence and protection will evolve as the economy migrates into cyberspace.

地形与气候在早期历史中发挥了重要作用。第一批国家出现在被沙漠包围的洪泛区，例如美索不达米亚和埃及，那里灌溉用水充足，但周围地区过于干旱，无法支持自耕农耕作。在这种情况下，个体农民因未能合作维持政治结构而面临非常高昂的代价。没有灌溉（只能大规模提供灌溉），庄稼就无法生长。没有庄稼就意味着饥饿。控制沙漠水源的人处于强势地位，这种条件造就了专制而富有的政府。

Topography, in conjunction with climate, had a major role to play in early history. The first states emerged on floodplains, surrounded by desert, such as in Mesopotamia and Egypt, where water for irrigation was plentiful but surrounding regions were too dry to support yeoman farming. Under such conditions, individual farmers faced a very high cost for failing to cooperate in maintaining the political structure. Without irrigation, which could be provided only on a large scale, crops would not grow. No crops meant starvation. The conditions that placed those who controlled the water in a desert in a position of strength made for despotic and rich government.

正如我们在《大清算》中所分析的那样，地形条件在古希腊自耕农的繁荣中也发挥了重要作用，使该地区成为西方民主的摇篮。鉴于三千年前地中海地区普遍存在的原始交通条件，居住在离海几英里以外的人几乎不可能在生产古代世界高价值作物橄榄和葡萄方面竞争。如果油和酒必须通过陆路运输，那么运输成本将非常高无法以盈利的方式出售。希腊沿海地区海岸线复杂，这意味着希腊大部分地区距离大海不超过二十英里。这为希腊农民提供了决定性的优势，使他们比内陆地区的潜在竞争对手更具优势。

As we analyzed in The Great Reckoning, topographic conditions also played a major role in the prosperity of yeoman farmers in ancient Greece, enabling that region to become the cradle of Western democracy. Given the primitive transportation conditions prevailing in the Mediterranean region three thousand years ago, it was all but impossible for persons living more than a few miles from the sea to compete in the production of high-value crops of the ancient world, olives and grapes. If the oil and the wine had to be transported any distance overland, the portage costs were so great that they could not be sold at a profit. The elaborate shoreline of the Greek littoral meant that most areas of Greece were no more than twenty miles from the sea. This gave a decisive advantage to Greek farmers over their potential competitors in landlocked areas.

由于在交易高价值产品方面具有这种优势，希腊农民只需控制一小块土地就能获得高额收入。这些高额收入使他们能够购买昂贵的盔甲。古希腊著名的重装步兵是农民或地主，他们自费武装自己。希腊重装步兵装备精良、斗志昂扬，军事实力强大，不容忽视。地形条件是希腊民主的基础，就像其他类型的地形条件催生了埃及和其他地方的东方专制一样。

Because of this advantage in trading high-value products, Greek farmers earned high incomes from control of only small parcels of land. These high incomes enabled them to purchase costly armor. The famous hoplites of ancient Greece were farmers or landlords who armed themselves at their own expense. Both well armed and well motivated, the Greek hoplites were militarily formidable and could not be ignored. Topographic conditions were the foundation of Greek democracy, just as those of a different kind gave rise to the Oriental despotisms of Eygpt and elsewhere.

2. 气候也有助于设定使用暴力的界限。气候变化是人类从觅食到农耕的第一次重大转变的催化剂。大约一万三千年前，上一个冰河时代的结束导致了植被的彻底改变。从冰河时代最先消退的近东地区开始，气温和降雨量的逐渐上升使森林蔓延到以前是草原的地区。特别是山毛榉森林的迅速蔓延严重限制了人类的饮食。正如苏珊·艾琳·格雷格在《觅食者和农民》一书中所说：

2. Climate also helps set the boundaries within which brute force can be exercised. A climatic change was the catalyst for the first major transition from foraging to farming. The end of the last Ice Age, about thirteen thousand years ago, led to a radical alteration in vegetation. Beginning in the Near East, where the Ice Age retreated first, a gradual rise in temperature and rainfall spread forests into areas that had previously been grasslands. In particular, the rapid spread of beech forests seriously curtailed the human diet. As Susan Ailing Gregg put it in Foragers and Farmers:

山毛榉森林的建立必定对当地人类、植物和动物种群产生了严重影响。橡树林的树冠相对开放，大量阳光可以照射到森林地面。混合灌木、草本植物和草类的茂盛灌木丛生长起来，植物的多样性养育了各种野生动物。相比之下，山毛榉森林的树冠封闭，森林地面被浓密的阴影笼罩。除了在树叶出现之前出现的春季一年生植物外，只有耐荫的莎草、蕨类植物和一些草类。” ¹⁸

The establishment of beech forests must have had serious consequences for local human, plant and animal populations. The canopy of an oak forest is relatively open and allows large amounts of sunlight to reach the forest floor. An exuberant undergrowth of mixed shrubs, forbs, and grasses develops, and the diversity of plants supports a variety of wildlife. In contrast, the canopy of a beech forest is closed and the forest floor is heavily shaded. Other than a flush of spring annuals prior to the emergence of the leaves, only shade-tolerant sedges, ferns, and a few grasses are found.”¹⁸

^{随着时间的}推移，茂密的森林侵占了开阔的平原，并蔓延到整个欧洲的东部草原。19森林减少了可供大型动物放牧的牧场面积，使人类觅食者越来越难以养活自己。

Over time, dense forests encroached on the open plains, spreading throughout Europe into the Eastern steppes.¹⁹ The forests reduced the grazing area available to support large animals, making it increasingly difficult for the population of human foragers to support themselves.

在冰河时代的繁荣时期，狩猎采集者的数量激增，无法靠日益减少的大型哺乳动物群来维持生活，其中许多物种因被捕杀而灭绝。向农业的过渡并不是出于个人喜好，而是为了弥补饮食不足而采取的即兴行动。在更北部的地区，觅食仍然占主导地位，因为那里的变暖趋势没有对大型哺乳动物的栖息地造成不利影响，而在热带雨林中，全球变暖趋势并没有对那里的食物造成不利影响供应。自从农业出现以来，气候变化更常见的情况是气候变冷而不是气候变暖。

The population of hunter-gatherers had swollen too greatly during the Ice Age prosperity to support itself on the dwindling herds of large mammals, many species of which were hunted to extinction. The transition to agriculture was not a choice of preference, but an improvisation adopted under duress to make up for shortfalls in the diet. Foraging continued to predominate in those areas farther north, where the warming trend had not adversely affected the habitats of large mammals, and in tropical rainforests, where the global warming trend did not have the perverse effect of reducing food supplies. Since the advent of farming, it has been far more common for changes to be precipitated by the cooling rather than the warming of the climate.

如果气候继续波动，那么对过去社会气候变化动态的适度了解将大有裨益。如果你知道平均气温下降 1 摄氏度会使作物的生长季缩短三到四周，使作物生长的最高海拔降低 500 英尺，那么你就能了解未来限制人们行动的边界条件。20 你可以利用这些知识预测从粮食价格到土地价值等各方面的变化。你甚至可以得出关于气温下降对实际收入和政治稳定可能产生的影响的明智结论。过去，如果农作物歉收持续数年^导致粮食价格上涨和可支配收入减少，政府就会被推翻。

A modest understanding of the dynamics of climatic change in past societies could well prove useful in the event that climates continue to fluctuate. If you know that a drop of one degree Centigrade on average reduces the growing season by three to four weeks and shaves five hundred feet off the maximum elevation at which crops can be grown, then you know something about the boundary conditions that will confine people’s action in the future.²⁰ You can use this knowledge to forecast changes in everything from grain prices to land values. You may even be able to draw informed conclusions about the likely impact of falling temperatures on real incomes and political stability. In the past, governments have been overthrown when crop failures extending over several years raised food prices and shrank disposable incomes.

例如，17 世纪是近代以来最冷的时期，同时也是世界范围内革命的时期，这绝非巧合。造成这种不幸的一个隐藏的超级政治原因是天气急剧变冷。事实上，天气如此寒冷，以至于凡尔赛宫“太阳王”桌上的葡萄酒都结冰了。生长季缩短导致农作物歉收，实际收入减少。由于天气变冷，繁荣开始逐渐消退，演变成始于 1620 年左右的长期全球大萧条。事实证明，这场大萧条极大地破坏了稳定。17 世纪的经济危机导致世界被叛乱所淹没，许多叛乱集中在 1648 年，比另一轮更著名的叛乱早了整整两百年。1640 年至 1650 年间，爱尔兰、苏格兰、英格兰、葡萄牙、加泰罗尼亚、法国、莫斯科、那不勒斯、西西里、巴西、波西米亚、乌克兰、奥地利、波兰、瑞典、荷兰和土耳其都爆发了叛乱。甚至连中国和日本也陷入了动乱。

For example, it is no coincidence that the seventeenth century, the coldest in the modern period, was also a period of revolution worldwide. A hidden megapolitical cause of this unhappiness was sharply colder weather. It was so cold, in fact, that wine froze on the “Sun King’s” table at Versailles. Shortened growing seasons produced crop failures and undermined real income. Because of the colder weather, prosperity began to wind down into a long global depression that began around 1620. It proved drastically destabilizing. The economic crisis of the seventeenth century led to the world being overwhelmed by rebellions, many clustering in 1648, exactly two hundred years before another and more famous cycle of rebellions. Between 1640 and 1650, there were rebellions in Ireland, Scotland, England, Portugal, Catalonia, France, Moscow, Naples, Sicily, Brazil, Bohemia, Ukraine, Austria, Poland, Sweden, the Netherlands, and Turkey. Even China and Japan were swept with unrest.

重商主义在 17 世纪贸易萎缩时期占主导地位，这也许并非巧合。经济封锁在 17 世纪末最为明显，当时“发生了一场可怕的饥荒”。21^到了 18 世纪，尤其是 1750 年以后，气温升高和农作物产量增加开始提高西欧的实际收入，足以扩大对制成品的需求。人们采取了更多的自由市场政策。这导致了自我强化的经济增长，因为工业规模扩大，这通常被称为工业革命。技术和制成品产出的重要性日益增加，减少了天气对经济周期的影响。

It may also be no coincidence that mercantilism predominated in the seventeenth century during a period of shrinking trade. Economic closure was perhaps most pronounced at the end of the century, “when a terrible famine occurred.”²¹ By the eighteenth century, especially after 1750, warmer temperatures and higher crop yields had begun to raise real incomes in Western Europe sufficiently to expand demand for manufactured goods. More free-market policies were adopted. This led to a self-reinforcing burst of economic growth as industry expanded to a larger scale in what is commonly described as the Industrial Revolution. The growing importance of technology and manufactured output reduced the impact of the weather on economic cycles.

然而，即使在今天，你也不应该低估突然变冷的天气对降低实际收入的影响——即使在富裕地区，例如北美。当现有制度配置耗尽其潜力时，社会很容易陷入危机。过去，这种趋势通常表现为人口增长使土地的承载能力达到极限。这种情况在公元 1000 年之前和 15 世纪末都曾发生过。作物歉收和单产下降导致的实际收入暴跌在两种情况下都对破坏主导制度起到了重要作用。如今，边缘化体现在消费信贷市场。如果急剧的寒冷天气导致作物单产下降并降低可支配收入，这将导致债务违约和税收叛乱。如果以过去为鉴，那么经济封闭和政治不稳定都可能出现。

Even today, however, you should not underestimate the impact of suddenly colder weather in lowering real incomes—even in wealthy regions such as North America. There is a strong tendency for societies to render themselves crisis-prone when the existing configuration of institutions has exhausted its potential. In the past, this tendency has often been manifested by population increases that stretched the carrying capacity of land to the limit. This happened both before the transition of the year 1000 and again at the end of the fifteenth century. The plunge in real income caused by crop failures and lower yields played a significant role in both instances in destroying the predominant institutions. Today the marginalization is manifested in the consumer credit markets. If sharply colder weather reduced crop yields and lowered disposable incomes, this would lead to debt default as well as tax rebellions. If the past is a guide, both economic closure and political instability could result.

3. 微生物赋予了伤害的力量或免于伤害的能力，而这种能力往往决定了权力的行使方式。正如我们在《大清算》中所探讨的那样，欧洲人征服新大陆时的情况确实如此。欧洲定居者来自疾病肆虐的定居农业社会，他们带来了对麻疹等儿童感染的相对免疫力。他们遇到的印第安人大多生活在人口稀少的觅食带中。他们没有这样的免疫力，因此被大量杀害。通常，最大的死亡发生在白人到来之前，因为在海岸上第一次遇到欧洲人的印第安人带着感染进入内陆。

3. Microbes convey power to harm or immunity from harm in ways that have often determined how power was exercised. This was certainly the case in the European conquest of the New World, as we explored in The Great Reckoning. European settlers, arriving from settled agricultural societies riddled with disease, brought with them relative immunity from childhood infections like measles. The Indians they encountered lived largely in thinly populated foraging bands. They possessed no such immunity and were decimated. Often, the greatest mortality occurred before white people even arrived, as Indians who first encountered Europeans on the coasts traveled inland with infections.

行使权力还存在微生物障碍。在《街头血案》中，我们讨论了强效疟疾菌株在使热带非洲免受白人入侵方面发挥的作用，这种作用持续了数个世纪。在十九世纪中叶发现奎宁之前，白人军队无法在疟疾肆虐的地区生存，无论他们的武器多么先进。

There are also microbiological barriers to the exercise of power. In Blood in the Streets, we discussed the role that potent strains of malaria served in making tropical Africa impervious to invasion by white men for many centuries. Before the discovery of quinine in the mid-nineteenth century, white armies could not survive in malarial regions, however superior their weapons might have been.

人类与微生物之间的相互作用也产生了重要的人口效应，改变了暴力的成本和回报。当死亡率因流行病、饥荒或其他原因而波动较大时，战争中死亡的相对风险就会下降。从 16 世纪开始，死亡率的爆发频率下降有助于解释家庭规模变小，最终导致当今对战争中猝死的容忍度远低于过去。这降低了对帝国主义的容忍度，并增加了低出生率社会投射权力的成本。

The interaction between humans and microbes has also produced important demographic effects that altered the costs and rewards of violence. When fluctuations in mortality are high due to epidemic disease, famine, or other causes, the relative risk of mortality in warfare falls. The declining frequency of eruptions in death rates from the sixteenth century onward helps explain smaller family size and, ultimately, the far lower tolerance of sudden death in war today as compared to the past. This has had the effect of lowering the tolerance for imperialism and raising the costs of projecting power in societies with low birthrates.

当代社会由小家庭组成，即使是少量的战争死亡也难以忍受。相比之下，早期现代社会对帝国主义造成的死亡成本要宽容得多。在本世纪之前，大多数父母都会生很多孩子，其中一些孩子可能会因疾病而随机和突然死亡。在一个时代当早逝成为普遍现象时，参军入伍的士兵和他们的家人面对战场危险时，抵抗就会减少。

Contemporary societies, comprising small families, tend to find even small numbers of battle deaths intolerable. By contrast, early modern societies were much more tolerant of the mortality costs associated with imperialism. Before this century, most parents gave birth to many children, some of whom were expected to die randomly and suddenly from disease. In an era when early death was commonplace, would-be soldiers and their families faced the dangers of the battlefield with less resistance.

“机械具有攻击性。织布工变成一张网，机械师变成一台机器。如果你不使用工具，他们就会利用你。”

—E默森

“Machinery is aggressive. The weaver becomes a web, the machinist a machine. If you do not use tools, they use you."

—EMERSON

4. 当今时代，技术在决定军事投射的成本和回报方面发挥着迄今为止最大的作用。本书的论点认为，技术将继续发挥这种作用。技术有几个关键维度：

4. Technology has played by far the largest role in determining the costs and rewards of projecting power during the modern centuries. The argument of this book presumes it will continue to do so. Technology has several crucial dimensions:

1. 攻守平衡。现行武器技术所隐含的攻守平衡有助于确定政治组织的规模。当进攻能力不断提高时，远距离投射力量的能力占主导地位，管辖范围趋于巩固，政府规模也随之扩大。在其他时候，比如现在，防御能力正在提高。这使得在核心区域之外投射力量的成本更高。管辖范围趋于分散，大政府分裂成小政府。
2. Balance between offense and defense. The balance between the offense and the defense implied by prevailing weapons technology helps determine the scale of political organization. When offensive capabilities are rising, the ability to project power at a distance predominates, jurisdictions tend to consolidate, and governments form on a larger scale. At other times, like now, defensive capabilities are rising. This makes it more costly to project power outside of core areas. Jurisdictions tend to devolve, and big governments break down into smaller ones.
3. 平等和步兵的优势。决定公民平等程度的一个关键因素是武器技术的性质。相对便宜、非专业人员也能使用、并能提高步兵军事重要性的武器往往能使力量均衡。托马斯·杰斐逊写道：“人人生而平等”，他所说的比几个世纪前类似的说法要正确得多。手持猎枪的农民不仅装备精良，而且装备更好。手持猎枪的农民可以从更远的距离向士兵射击，而且比士兵的还击更准确。这与中世纪的情况截然不同，当时手持干草叉的农民——他买不起更多干草叉——几乎不可能与全副武装的骑马骑士对抗。1276 年，没有人写过“人人生而平等”。当时，从最明显的意义来看，人是不平等的。一名骑士所施加的蛮力远比数十名农民加起来的蛮力要大得多。
4. Equality and the predominance of the infantry. A key feature determining the degree of equality among citizens is the nature of weapons technology. Weapons that are relatively cheap, can be employed by nonprofessionals, and enhance the military importance of infantry tend to equalize power. When Thomas Jefferson wrote that “all men are created equal,” he was saying something that was much more true than a similar statement would have seemed centuries earlier. A farmer with his hunting rifle was not only as well armed as the typical British soldier with his Brown Bess, he was better armed. The farmer with the rifle could shoot at the soldier from a greater distance, and with greater accuracy than the soldier could return fire. This was a distinctly different circumstance from the Middle Ages, when a farmer with a pitchfork—he could not have afforded more—could scarcely have hoped to stand against a heavily armed knight on horseback. No one was writing in 1276 that “all men are created equal.” At that time, in the most manifestly important sense, men were not equal. A single knight exercised far more brute force than dozens of peasants put together.
5. 暴力规模的优势和劣势。另一个有助于确定是否存在少数大政府或许多大政府的变量小型组织是部署现行武器所需的组织规模。当暴力的回报不断增加时，大规模的政府运作会更有回报；因此政府往往会变得更大。当一小群人能够掌握抵抗大群人攻击的有效手段时，主权往往会分裂，中世纪的情况就是如此。小型、独立的当局行使政府的许多职能。正如我们在后面章节中探讨的那样，我们相信信息时代将带来网络战士的曙光，他们将成为权力下放的先驱。网络战士不仅可以由民族国家部署，还可以由非常小的组织甚至个人部署。下一个千年的战争将包括一些几乎不流血的计算机战斗。
6. Advantages and disadvantages of scale in violence. Another variable that helps determine whether there are a few large governments or many small ones is the scale of organization required to deploy the prevailing weapons. When there are increasing returns to violence, it is more rewarding to operate governments at a large scale; therefore governments tend to get bigger. When a small group can command effective means of resisting an assault by a large group, which was the case during the Middle Ages, sovereignty tends to fragment. Small, independent authorities exercise many of the functions of government. As we explore in a latter chapter, we believe that the Information Age will bring the dawn of cybersoldiers, who will be heralds of devolution. Cybersoldiers could be deployed not merely by nation-states but by very small organizations, and even by individuals. Wars of the next millennium will include some almost bloodless battles fought with computers.
7. 生产规模经济。决定最终权力是在当地行使还是在远处行使的另一个重要因素是人们赖以谋生的主导企业的规模。当关键企业只有在一个包罗万象的贸易区内大规模组织起来才能发挥最佳作用时，那些扩大规模以为其保护下的企业提供这种环境的政府可能会获得足够的额外财富来支付维持一个庞大的政治体系的成本。在这种情况下，整个世界经济通常在一个至高无上的世界强国统治所有其他强国的情况下运转得更有效，就像 19 世纪的大英帝国一样。

   但有时，大型政治变量会结合起来导致规模经济下降。如果维持大型贸易区的经济利益减少，那么之前因利用包罗万象的贸易区而繁荣起来的大型政府可能会开始分崩离析——即使进攻和防御之间的武器平衡与过去大致相同。

8. Economies of scale in production. Another important factor that weighs in the balance in determining whether ultimate power is exercised locally or from a distance is the scale of the predominant enterprises in which people gain their livelihoods. When crucial enterprises can function optimally only when they are organized on a large scale in an encompassing trading area, governments that expand to provide such a setting for enterprises under their protection may rake off enough additional wealth to pay the costs of maintaining a large political system. Under such conditions, the entire world economy usually functions more effectively where one supreme world power dominates all others, as the British Empire did in the nineteenth century.

   But sometimes megapolitical variables combine to produce falling economies of scale. If the economic benefits of maintaining a large trading area dwindle, larger governments that previously prospered from exploiting the benefits of encompassing trading areas may begin to break apart—even if the balance of weaponry between offense and defense otherwise remains much as it had been.

9. 技术的分散。影响权力方程式的另一个因素是关键技术的分散程度。当武器或生产工具能够被有效地储存或垄断时，它们往往会集中权力。即使是本质上具有防御性质的技术，如机枪，也被证明是强大的进攻性武器，在它们没有广泛传播的时期，这有助于提高治理规模。当欧洲列强在十九世纪末垄断机枪时，他们能够使用这些武器对付边缘地区的人民，从而大幅扩张殖民帝国。后来，在二十世纪，当机枪变得广泛使用时，特别是在第二次世界大战之后，它们被用来帮助摧毁帝国的力量。在其他条件相同的情况下，关键技术分布越广泛，它们就越有可能成为统治者手中的武器。越大，权力分散得越广，最优政府规模就越小。
10. Dispersal of technology. Still another factor that contributes to the power equation is the degree of dispersal of key technologies. When weapons or tools of production can be effectively hoarded or monopolized, they tend to centralize power. Even technologies that are essentially defensive in character, like the machine gun, proved to be potent offensive weapons, that contributed to a rising scale of governance during the period when they were not widely dispersed. When the European powers enjoyed a monopoly on machine guns late in the nineteenth century, they were able to use those weapons against peoples at the periphery to dramatically expand colonial empires. Later, in the twentieth century, when machine guns became widely available, especially in the wake of World War II, they were deployed to help destroy the power of empires. Other things being equal, the more widely dispersed key technologies are, the more widely dispersed power will tend to be, and the smaller the optimum scale of government.

大型政治变革的速度​​​

THE SPEED OF MEGAPOLITICAL CHANGE

尽管技术是当今最重要的因素，并且显然日益重要，但四大政治因素在过去都对决定权力的规模发挥了作用。

While technology is by far the most important factor today, and apparently growing more so, all four major megapolitical factors have played a role in determining the scale at which power could be exercised in the past.

这些因素共同决定了暴力的回报是否会随着暴力的大规模使用而继续上升。这决定了火力大小与资源使用效率的重要性。它还强烈影响着市场的收入分配。问题是，它们在未来将扮演什么角色？估计答案的关键在于认识到这些大政治变量的变化速度截然不同。

Together, these factors determine whether the returns to violence continue to rise as violence is employed on a larger scale. This determines the importance of magnitude of firepower versus efficiency in employing resources. It also strongly influences the market distribution of income. The question is, What role will they command in the future? A key to estimating an answer lies in recognizing that these megapolitical variables mutate at dramatically different speeds.

在整个有记载的历史中，地形几乎是固定的。除了港口淤积、垃圾填埋场或侵蚀等局部影响外，今天的地球地形几乎与亚当和夏娃离开伊甸园时一样。而且，这种情况很可能一直持续到下一个冰河时代重新塑造大陆景观，或者其他一些剧烈事件扰乱地球表面。从更深层次的角度来看，地质时代似乎发生了变化，也许是由于大型陨石撞击，在 1000 万到 4000 万年的时间里。有一天，可能再次发生地质剧变，大大改变我们星球的地形。如果发生这种情况，你可以放心地假设棒球和板球赛季都将被取消。

Topography has been almost fixed through the whole of recorded history. Except for minor local effects involving the silting of harbors, landfills, or erosion, the topography of the earth is almost the same today as it was when Adam and Eve straggled out of Eden. And it is likely to remain so until another Ice Age recarves the landscapes of continents or some other drastic event disturbs the surface of the earth. At a more profound scale, geological ages seem to shift, perhaps in response to large meteorite strikes, over a period of 10 to 40 million years. Someday, there may again be geological upheavals that will alter significantly the topography of our planet. If that happens, you can safely assume that both the baseball and cricket seasons will be canceled.

气候变化比地形变化更为剧烈。在过去的百万年中，气候变化是造成地球表面特征变化的主要原因。在冰河时期，冰川凿出新的山谷，改变河流的流向，将岛屿与大陆分开或通过降低海平面将它们连接在一起。气候变化在历史上发挥了重要作用，首先是在上一个冰河时期结束后促成了农业革命，后来在寒冷和干旱时期破坏了政权的稳定。

Climate fluctuates much more actively than topography. In the last million years, climatic change has been responsible for most of the known variation in the features of the earth’s surface. During Ice Ages, glaciers gouged new valleys, altered the course of rivers, severed islands from continents or joined them together by lowering the sea level. Fluctuations in climate have played a significant role in history, first in precipitating the Agricultural Revolution after the close of the last Ice Age, and later in destabilizing regimes during periods of colder temperatures and drought.

最近，人们开始担心“全球变暖”可能带来的影响。这些担忧不能轻易消除。然而，从长远来看，更有可能的风险似乎是气候变冷，而不是变暖。基于对海底岩心样本氧同位素分析的温度波动研究表明，当前时期是 200 多万年以来第二温暖的时期。22^如果气温像 17 世纪那样变冷，这可能会破坏大国政治的稳定。目前有关全球变暖的警报可能在这个意义上令人放心。如果这些警报属实，那么气温将继续在过去三个世纪经历的异常温暖和相对温和的范围内波动。

Lately, there have been concerns over the possible impact of “global warming.” These concerns cannot be dismissed out of hand. Yet, taking a longer perspective, the more likely risk appears to be a shift toward a colder, not a warmer climate. Study of temperature fluctuations based upon analysis of oxygen isotopes in core samples taken from the ocean floor show that the current period is the second warmest in more than 2 million years.²² If temperatures were to turn colder, as they did in the seventeenth century, that might prove megapolitically destabilizing. Current alarms about global warming may in that sense be reassuring. To the extent that they are true, that assures that temperatures will continue to fluctuate within the abnormally warm and relatively benign range experienced for the past three centuries.

微生物对权力行使的影响变化速度更令人费解。微生物可以非常迅速地变异。病毒尤其如此。例如，普通感冒的变异方式几乎千变万化。然而，尽管这些变异进展迅速，但它们对权力行使边界的改变的影响远不如技术变革那么突然。为什么？部分原因是自然界的正常平衡往往使微生物有利于感染宿主群体，而不会摧毁宿主群体。致命的感染很容易杀死宿主，往往会在此过程中自我消灭。微寄生虫的生存取决于它们对所入侵宿主的致命性，而不是太快或一律致命。

The rate of change in the influence of microbes on the exercise of power is more of a puzzle. Microbes can mutate very rapidly. This is especially true of viruses. The common cold, for example, mutates in an almost kaleidoscopic way. Yet although these mutations proceed apace, their impact in shifting the boundaries where power is exercised have been far less abrupt than technological change. Why? Part of the reason is that the normal balance of nature tends to make it beneficial for microbes to infect but not destroy host populations. Virulent infections that kill their hosts too readily tend to eradicate themselves in the process. The survival of microparasites depends upon their not being too rapidly or uniformly fatal to the hosts they invade.

当然，这并不是说不会发生致命的疾病爆发，改变权力平衡。这类事件在历史上曾占有重要地位。黑死病消灭了欧亚大陆大部分人口，给 14 世纪的国际经济带来了毁灭性的打击。

That is not to say, of course, that there cannot be deadly eruptions of disease that alter the balance of power. Such episodes have figured prominently in history. The Black Death wiped out large fractions of the population of Eurasia and dealt a crushing blow to the fourteenth-century version of the international economy.

本来可能发生的事情

What Might Have Been

历史既可以从可能发生的事情的角度来理解，也可以从过去发生的事情的角度来理解。我们不知道微寄生虫在现代时期不可能继续肆虐人类社会的原因。例如，微生物的权力障碍，相当于疟疾，但毒性更强，可能阻止西方入侵边缘地区。第一批勇敢的葡萄牙探险家航行到非洲海域时，可能感染了一种致命的逆转录病毒，这是一种传染性更强的艾滋病，这种病毒会在通往亚洲的新贸易路线开通之前就阻止它。哥伦布和新大陆的第一批定居者也可能遭遇疾病，这些疾病使他们大量死亡，就像当地土著居民受到麻疹和其他西方儿童疾病的影响一样。然而，这种事情并没有发生，这种巧合强调了历史有命运的直觉。

History can be understood in terms of what might have been as well as what was. We know of no reason that microparasites could not have continued to play havoc with human society during the modern period. For example, it is possible that microbiological barriers to the exercise of power, equivalent to malaria but more virulent, could have halted the Western invasion of the periphery in its tracks. The first intrepid Portuguese adventurers who sailed into African waters could have contracted a deadly retrovirus, a more communicable version of AIDS, that would have stopped the opening of the new trade route to Asia before it even began. Columbus, too, and the first waves of settlers in the New World might have encountered diseases that decimated them in the same way that indigenous local populations were affected by measles and other Western childhood diseases. Yet nothing of the kind happened, a coincidence that underlines the intuition that history has a destiny.

在现代时期，微生物对权力巩固的阻碍作用远大于促进作用。西方军队和边缘殖民者经常发现，微生物技术优势凸显了他们投射力量的技术优势。西方人武装拥有看不见的生物武器的他们相对免疫儿童疾病，而这些疾病常常摧毁土著人民。这让来自西方的航行者拥有了明显的优势，而来自人口较少地区的对手则没有这种优势。随着事件的发展，疾病几乎完全是朝一个方向传播的——从欧洲向外传播。而疾病则没有朝另一个方向传播，即从边缘地区向核心地区传播。

Microbes did far less to impede the consolidation of power in the modern period than to facilitate it. Western troops and colonists at the periphery often found that the technological advantages that allowed them to project power were underscored by microbiological ones. Westerners were armed with unseen biological weapons, their relative immunity to childhood diseases that frequently devastated native peoples. This gave voyagers from the West a distinct advantage that their antagonists from less densely settled regions lacked. As events unfolded, the disease transfer was almost entirely in one direction—from Europe outward. There was no equivalent transfer of disease in the other direction, from the periphery to the core.

一个可能的反例是，有人声称西方探险家将梅毒从新大陆带入了欧洲。这种说法值得商榷。但如果属实，那么它并没有成为行使权力的重大障碍。梅毒的主要影响是改变了西方的性观念。

As a possible counterexample, some have claimed that Western explorers imported syphilis from the New World to Europe. This is arguable. If true, however, it did not prove to be a significant barrier to the exercise of power. The major impact of syphilis was to shift sexual mores in the West.

从 15 世纪末到 20 世纪最后 25 年，微生物对工业社会的影响越来越温和。尽管肺结核、脊髓灰质炎和流感的爆发造成了个人悲剧和不幸，但现代时期没有出现任何新疾病，甚至没有接近安东尼瘟疫或黑死病对政治的巨大影响。公共卫生的改善以及疫苗和解毒剂的出现，总体上降低了现代时期传染性微生物的重要性，从而提高了技术在设定权力行使边界方面的相对重要性。

From the end of the fifteenth century to the last quarter of the twentieth, the impact of microbes on industrial society was ever more benign. Notwithstanding the personal tragedies and unhappiness caused by outbreaks of tuberculosis, polio, and flu, no new diseases emerged in the modern period that even approached the megapolitical impact of the Antonine plagues or the Black Death. Improving public health, and the advent of vaccinations and antidotes, generally reduced the importance of infectious microbes during the modern period, thereby increasing the relative importance of technology in setting the boundaries where power was exercised.

最近出现的艾滋病和对外来病毒可能传播的担忧，都暗示着微生物在未来的政治大选中所起的作用可能并不像过去五百年那样完全是无害的。但新的瘟疫何时或是否会感染世界尚不得而知。与气候或地形的剧烈变化相比，微寄生虫的爆发（如病毒大流行）更有可能破坏技术在政治大选中的主导地位。

The recent emergence of AIDS and alarms over the potential spread of exotic viruses are hints that the role of microbes may not be altogether as megapolitically benign in the future as it has been over the past five hundred years. But when or whether a new plague will infect the world is unknowable. An eruption of microparasites, such as a viral pandemic, rather than drastic changes in climate or topography, would more likely disrupt the megapolitical predominance of technology.

我们无法监测或预测地球生命本质的重大变化。我们祈祷并假设下一个千年的主要超级政治变量将是技术而不是微生物。如果运气继续站在人类这一边，技术将继续成为领先的超级政治变量。

We have no way of monitoring or anticipating drastic departures from the nature of life on earth as we have known it. We cross our fingers and assume that the major megapolitical variables in the next millennium will be technological rather than microbiological. If luck continues to side with humanity, technology will continue to grow in prominence as the leading megapolitical variable.

然而，情况并不总是这样的，回顾第一次伟大的政治变革——农业革命，我们可以清楚地看到。

It was not always such, however, as a review of the first great megapolitical transformation, the Agricultural Revolution, clearly shows.

第三章伊甸园之东 农业革命与暴力的复杂化

CHAPTER 3 EAST OF EDEN The Agricultural Revolution and the Sophistication of Violence

“耶和华对该隐说，你兄弟亚伯在哪里？他说，我不知道；我岂是看守我兄弟的吗？耶和华又说，你作了什么呢？你兄弟的血有声音从地里向我哀告。”

—创世记4:9-10

“And the Lord said unto Cain, Where is Abel, thy brother? And he said, I know not; Am I my brother’s keeper? And he said, What hast thou done? the voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto me from the ground”.

—GENESIS 4:9-10

五百代以前，人类社会组织的第一阶段变化开始了。1我们的祖先在几个地区勉强拿起粗糙的工具，磨尖木桩和临时锄头，开始工作。^当他们播下第一批庄稼时，他们也为世界权力奠定了新的基础。农业革命是第一次伟大的经济和社会革命。它始于伊甸园的驱逐，进展非常缓慢，以至于到二十世纪初，农业还没有完全取代全球所有适宜地区的狩猎和采集。专家认为，即使在农业最早出现的近东地区，它的引入也是“一个漫长的渐进过程”，“可能需要五千年或更长时间” ^。2

Five hundred generations ago, the first phase change in the organization of human society began.¹ Our ancestors in several regions reluctantly picked up crude implements, sharpened stakes and makeshift hoes, and went to work. As they sowed the first crops, they also laid a new foundation for power in the world. The Agricultural Revolution was the first great economic and social revolution. It started with the expulsion from Eden and moved so slowly that farming had not completely displaced hunting and gathering in all suitable areas of the globe when the twentieth century opened. Experts believe that even in the Near East, where farming first emerged, it was introduced in “a long incremental process” that “may have taken five thousand years or more.”²

将一个持续数千年的过程描述为“革命”似乎有些夸张。然而，农耕的出现正是一场缓慢的革命，它通过改变暴力的逻辑改变了人类的生活。无论农耕在哪里扎根，暴力都会成为社会生活中更重要的特征。善于操纵或控制暴力的等级制度逐渐主宰了社会。

It may seem an exaggeration to describe a process that stretched out over millennia as a “revolution.” Yet that is precisely what the advent of farming was, a slow-motion revolution that transformed human life by altering the logic of violence. Wherever farming took root, violence emerged as a more important feature of social life. Hierarchies adept at manipulating or controlling violence came to dominate society.

了解农业革命是了解信息革命的第一步。耕作和收割的引入提供了一个典型例子，说明工作性质的简单转变如何彻底改变社会组织。从过去的这场革命的角度来看待它，你就能更好地预测历史将如何应对微处理器带来的新暴力逻辑。

Understanding the Agricultural Revolution is a first step toward understanding the Information Revolution. The introduction of tilling and harvesting provides a paradigm example of how an apparently simple shift in the character of work can radically alter the organization of society. Put this past revolution into perspective and you are in a far stronger position to forecast how history may unfold in response to the new logic of violence introduced with microprocessors.

要理解农业的革命性，首先需要了解原始社会在农耕之前的运作方式。我们在《大清算》中对此进行了概述，并在下文中提供了进一步的概述。在人类生活几代人之间几乎没有变化的漫长史前沉睡时期，狩猎采集社会是唯一的社会组织形式。人类学家声称，自从我们出现在地球上以来，人类 99% 的时间都是狩猎采集者。狩猎采集群体的长期成功和最终失败的关键在于他们必须在非常广阔的区域内以非常小的规模进行活动。

To appreciate the revolutionary character of agriculture, you first need a picture of how the primeval society functioned before farming. We surveyed this in The Great Reckoning and offer a further sketch below. Hunting-and-gathering societies were the only forms of social organization through a long, prehistoric slumber when human life changed little or not at all from generation to generation. Anthropologists claim that humans have been hunters and gatherers for 99 percent of the time since we appeared on earth. Crucial to the long success and ultimate failure of hunting-and-gathering bands is the fact that they had to operate on a very small scale over a very wide area.

觅食者只能在人口密度较低的地方生存。要了解原因，请想想人数较多的群体会带来哪些问题。首先，一千名猎人一起在一片土地上游行会引发巨大的骚动，吓跑他们想要捕获的猎物。更糟糕的是，如果一小群猎人偶尔设法围困一大群猎物，他们收获的食物（包括野外发现的水果和可食用植物）不可能长时间保持充足。一大群觅食者会像三十年战争中的饥饿军队一样，通过过度捕猎毁掉乡村。因此，为了最大限度地减少过度捕杀，狩猎队伍必须很小。正如斯蒂芬·博伊登在《生物学视角下的西方文明》中所写， “最常见的狩猎采集群体人数在 25 到 50 人之间。” ³

Foragers could survive only where population densities were light. To see why, think of the problems that larger groups would have posed. For one thing, a thousand hunters parading together across a landscape would have raised such a ruckus as to scare away the game they sought to trap. And even worse, had a small army of hunters occasionally managed to corner a huge herd of game, the food they harvested, including fruits and edible plants found in the wild, could not have remained plentiful for long. A large group of foragers would have laid waste to the countryside through overharvesting like a starving army in the Thirty Years War. Therefore, to minimize overkill, hunting bands had to be small. As Stephen Boyden writes in Western Civilization in Biological Perspective, “Most commonly, hunter-gatherer groups number between twenty-five and fifty individuals.”³

如今，在温带气候下，靠一万英亩土地生活是一种奢侈，只有非常富有的人才能享受。一个狩猎采集者家庭几乎无法靠更少的土地生存。他们通常每人需要数千英亩的土地，即使在最肥沃的觅食地区也是如此。这表明，为什么在特别有利于觅食的时期，人口的增长可能造成了人口危机。因为养活一个人需要这么多土地，狩猎采集社会的人口密度必须非常稀疏。在农业出现之前，人类的密度与熊差不多。

To live on ten thousand acres in a temperate climate today is a luxury allowed only to the very rich. A family of hunter-gatherers could scarcely have survived on less. They generally required thousands of acres per person, even in areas that were most fertile for foraging. This suggests why the growth of human populations during periods particularly favorable to foraging may have created the basis for population crises. Because so much land was required to support a single person, the population densities of hunting-and-gathering societies had to be incredibly sparse. Before farming, humans were about as densely settled as bears.

除了细微的差别外，人类的饮食与熊的饮食相似。觅食社会依靠从开阔的乡村或附近的水体采集的食物。虽然有些采集者是渔民，但大多数是猎人，他们三分之一到五分之一的食物依赖于来自大型哺乳动物。除了随身携带的一些简单工具和物品外，狩猎采集者几乎没有任何技术可供使用。他们通常没有办法有效地储存大量的肉或其他食物以备后用。大多数食物必须在采集后不久食用，否则就会变质。当然，这并不是说一些狩猎采集者不吃变质的食物。博伊登报道说，爱斯基摩人“特别喜欢腐烂的食物。” ⁴他重复了专家的观察，即爱斯基摩人“‘埋葬鱼头，让它们腐烂，直到骨头变得和肉一样稠。然后他们把散发着恶臭的物质揉成糊状并吃掉’；他们还喜欢‘生吃的肥胖的驯鹿蝇蛆虫幼虫……鹿粪，像浆果一样咀嚼……和一年多的骨髓，里面满是蛆虫。’” ⁵

With minor differences, the human diet resembled that of bears. Foraging societies depended upon food gathered from the open countryside or from nearby bodies of water. Although some gatherers were fishers, most were hunters who depended for a third to a fifth of their food upon protein from large mammals. Other than a few simple tools and objects carried around with them, hunter-gatherers had almost no technology at their disposal. They usually had no way to effectively store quantities of meat or other foods for later use. Most food had to be consumed soon after it was gathered or left to spoil. That is not say, of course, that some hunter-gatherers did not eat spoiled food. Eskimos, as Boyden reports, “are said to have a particular liking for decomposed food.”⁴ He repeats the observations of experts that Eskimos “ ‘bury fish heads and allow them to decay until the bones become of the same consistency as the flesh. They then knead the reeking mass into a paste and eat it’; they also enjoy the ‘fat maggoty larvae of the caribou fly served raw … deer droppings, munched like berries… and marrow more than a year old, swarming with maggots.’ ”⁵

除了这些美味佳肴外，觅食者几乎没有剩余食物。正如人类学家格雷格指出的那样，“流动人口通常不会储存食物以应对季节性或意外的资源短缺。”因此，觅食者几乎没有东西可偷。在无法储存剩余食物的环境中，包括使用暴力的专业化分工是无法容忍的。狩猎的逻辑还决定了狩猎和觅食群体之间的暴力行为永远不会超过小规模，因为群体本身必须保持很小的规模。

Other than such delicacies, foragers developed little surplus food. As anthropologist Gregg notes, “mobile populations generally do not store foodstuffs against seasonal or unexpected lows in resource availability.” Consequently, foragers had little to steal. A division of labor that included specialization to employ violence was insupportable in settings where surplus food could not be stored. The logic of the hunt also dictated that violence among hunting-and-foraging bands could never rise above a small scale because the groups themselves had to remain tiny.

采集群体规模小还有另一个好处。这种小群体的成员彼此非常熟悉，这使得他们能够更有效地合作。随着人数的增加，决策变得更加困难，因为激励陷阱会激增。你只需想想让十几个人组织起来出去吃饭有多难。想象一下，组织数百或数千人四处游荡，享受一场流动的盛宴是多么不可能。由于缺乏战争专业化所需的任何持续而独立的政治组织或官僚机构，狩猎采集群体必须依靠说服和共识——这些原则在态度相对随和的小群体中最为有效。

The small scale of foraging bands was advantageous in another way. Members of such small groups would have known one another intimately, a factor that made them more effective in working together. Decision-making becomes more difficult as numbers rise, because incentive traps proliferate. You need only think how hard it is to get a dozen people organized to go out to dinner. Imagine how hopeless would have been the task of organizing hundreds or thousands of persons to traipse around on a moveable feast. Lacking any sustained and separate political organization or bureaucracy required by specialization for war, hunting-and-gathering bands had to depend on persuasion and consensus—principles that work best among small groups with relatively easygoing attitudes.

狩猎采集族群是否随和尚有争议。亨利·梅因爵士提到“原始人普遍好战”。用他的话来说，“自然而原始的不是和平，而是战争。” ⁶进化生物学家的研究强调了他的观点。R.保罗·肖和尤瓦·黄评论道：“有强有力的迹象表明，欧洲第四次和第四次冰期前南方古猿、直立人和智人遗骸中出现的许多伤痕都是战斗造成的。” ⁷但其他人对此表示怀疑。斯蒂芬·博伊登等专家认为，原始群体通常不具备战争倾向，也不容易发生暴力行为。社会习俗的发展是为了减少内部紧张局势，促进狩猎的共享。特别是在人类捕食大型猎物的地区，这单个猎人很难猎获猎物，因此出现了宗教和社会教义，以促进整个群体猎获的任何猎物的重新分配。热量资源的共享首先是与其他猎人共享。需要，而不是感情，是推动因素。资源的优先索取权由经济能力最强和军事实力最强的人行使，而不是由病人和弱者行使。毫无疑问，影响这一优先权的主要因素是，处于人生巅峰的猎人也是小群体中军事实力最强的成员。通过确保他们首先索取狩猎资源，该群体将可能致命的内部争吵降到最低。

Whether hunting-and-gathering bands were easygoing is open to debate. Sir Henry Maine refers to “the universal belligerency of primitive man.” In his words, “It is not peace which is natural and primitive but war.”⁶ His view has been underlined by the work of evolutionary biologists. R. Paul Shaw and Yuwa Wong comment: “[T]here are strong indications that many of the injuries apparent in remains of Australopithecus, Homo erectus, and Homo sapiens of the European fourth and pre-fourth glacial periods resulted from combat.”⁷ But others doubt this. Experts like Stephen Boyden argue that primitive groups were usually not warlike or prone to violence. Social conventions developed to reduce internal tensions and facilitate the sharing of the hunt. Especially in areas where humans preyed on larger game, which was difficult for a single hunter to fell, religious and social doctrines emerged to facilitate the redistribution of any game that was taken with the whole group. The first priority of sharing of caloric resources was with other hunters. Necessity, rather than sentiment, was the spur. The first claim on the resources was exercised by the most economically competent and militarily strong, not by the sick and the weak. Undoubtedly, a major influence informing this priority was the fact that hunters in the prime of life were also militarily the most potent members of the small band. By assuring them a first claim on the hunt, the group minimized potentially lethal internal squabbling.

只要人口密度保持在较低水平，觅食者的神就不是好战的神，而是自然力量或他们所捕猎的动物的化身。资本的匮乏和边境的开放在大多数情况下使得战争没有必要。除了自己的小家庭或氏族之外，几乎没有邻居会构成威胁。由于觅食者往往四处游荡寻找食物，因此个人财产超过最低限度就成了负担。那些财产少的人必然很少遭遇财产犯罪。当冲突爆发时，争斗双方往往乐于一走了之，因为他们在某个地方投入的资金很少。逃跑是解决个人恩怨或其他过分要求的简单方法。这并不意味着早期人类是和平的。他们可能暴力和令人不快，到了我们难以想象的程度。但如果他们使用暴力，那主要是出于个人原因，或者更糟的是，为了取乐。

So long as population densities remained low, the foragers’ gods were not militant gods but embodiments of natural forces or the animals they hunted. The scantiness of capital and open frontiers made war in most cases unnecessary. There were few neighbors outside one’s own small family or clan to pose threats. Because foragers tended to roam in search of food, personal possessions beyond a bare minimum became an encumbrance. Those with few possessions necessarily experienced little property crime. When conflicts arose, the contending parties were often content to walk away because they had little invested in any given locale. Escape was an easy solution to personal feuds or exorbitant demands of other kinds. This does not mean that early humans were peaceful. They may have been violent and unpleasant to a degree we can scarcely imagine. But if they employed violence, it was mostly for personal reasons or, what may be worse, for sport.

狩猎采集者的生计依赖​​于他们在小群体中的活动，除了性别之外，几乎没有或根本没有分工的余地。他们没有组织政府，通常没有永久定居点，也没有积累财富的可能性。甚至连书面语言这样的文明基本组成部分在原始经济中都是未知的。没有书面语言，就没有正式的记录和历史。

The livelihoods of hunter-gatherers depended upon their functioning in small bands that allowed little or no scope for a division of labor other than along gender lines. They had no organized government, usually no permanent settlements, and no possibility for accumulating wealth. Even such basic building blocks of civilization as a written language were unknown in the primeval economy. Without a written language there could be no formal records and no history.

过度杀戮

Overkill

觅食的动态创造了与我们自农业出现以来习惯的截然不同的工作激励。觅食者的生活所需的资本很少。一些原始工具和武器就足够了。没有投资的出路，甚至没有土地的私有财产，除了偶尔在开采燧石或皂石的采石场。8正如人类学家苏珊·艾琳·格雷格在《觅食者与农民^》中所写， “资源的所有权和使用权”^是“群体共同拥有的”。9除了少数例外，例如生活在湖边的渔民，觅食者通常没有固定的住所。没有永久的在没有住房的情况下，他们几乎不需要努力工作来获得或维护财产。他们没有抵押贷款或税款要支付，也不需要购买家具。他们仅有的消费品是动物皮毛和团体成员自己制作的个人装饰品。他们几乎没有动力去购买或积累任何可能被视为金钱的东西，因为几乎没有东西可买。在这种情况下，对于觅食者来说，储蓄可能只是一个基本的概念。

The dynamic of foraging created very different incentives to work than those to which we have become accustomed since the advent of farming. The capital requirements for life as a forager were minimal. A few primitive tools and weapons sufficed. There was no outlet for investment, not even private property in land, except occasionally in quarries where flint or soapstone was mined.⁸ As anthropologist Susan Ailing Gregg wrote in Foragers and Farmers, “Ownership of and access to resources” was “held in common by the group.”⁹ With rare exceptions, such as fishers living on the shores of lakes, foragers usually had no fixed place of abode. Having no permanent homes, they had little need to work hard to acquire property or maintain it. They had no mortgage or taxes to pay, no furniture to buy. Their few consumer goods were animal skins, and personal adornments made by members of the group themselves. There was little incentive to acquire or accumulate anything that might have passed for money because there was little to buy. Under such conditions, savings for the foragers could have been no more than a rudimentary concept.

由于没有赚钱的理由，也几乎没有劳动分工，勤劳作为一种美德的概念对狩猎采集群体来说一定是陌生的。除了在异常艰苦的时期，需要长时间的努力才能找到食物，他们几乎不做任何工作，因为不需要什么。除了生存所需的最低限度的工作之外，几乎没有任何收获。对于典型的狩猎采集群体的成员来说，这意味着每周只工作大约八到十五个小时。10^因为猎人的劳动不会增加食物供应，而只会减少食物供应，所以那些英勇地加班加点地杀死更多动物或采摘比在腐烂前可以吃掉的更多的水果的人对繁荣没有任何贡献。相反，过度捕杀降低了未来找到食物的前景，从而对群体的福祉产生了不利影响。这就是为什么一些觅食者，如爱斯基摩人，会惩罚或排斥那些参与过度捕杀的群体成员。

With no reason to earn and almost no division of labor, the concept of hard work as a virtue must have been foreign to hunting-and-gathering groups. Except during periods of unusual hardship, when protracted effort was required to find something to eat, little work was done because little was needed. There was literally nothing to be gained by working beyond the bare minimum required for survival. For the members of the typical hunting-and-gathering band, that meant working only about eight to fifteen hours a week.¹⁰ Because a hunter’s labor did not augment the food supply but could only reduce it, one who heroically labored overtime to kill more animals or pick more fruit than could be eaten before it spoiled contributed nothing to prosperity. To the contrary, overkill reduced the prospects of finding food in the future, and thus had a detrimental impact on the well-being of the group. That is why some foragers, such as Eskimos, punished or ostracized members of the band who engaged in overkill.

爱斯基摩人惩罚过度捕杀的例子尤其具有说明意义，因为他们比其他人更有能力通过冷冻来储存肉类。此外，至少为大型海洋动物的油提供一些储存也是可行的。觅食者通常选择不这样做，这反映了他们与自然的互动要被动得多。这也可能表明认知和心理过程受到文化影响的程度。复杂环境中对学习和行为的限制使采用某些策略比原本看起来要困难得多。正如 R. Paul Shaw 和 Yuwa Wong 所写的那样，“因为生态位在许多方面存在差异，所以学习中的偏见也存在差异。” ¹¹

The example of the Eskimos punishing overkill is particularly telling, because they, far more than others, might well have been able to store meat by freezing it. Further, it would have been feasible to provide at least some storage for oils rendered from large marine animals. The fact that foragers generally chose not to do so reflects their far more passive interactions with nature. It may also indicate the degree to which cognition and mental processes are biased by culture. Constraints on learning and behavior in complex environments make adoption of some strategies far more difficult than would otherwise appear. As R. Paul Shaw and Yuwa Wong have written, “Because niches differ in many respects, so, too, do biases in learning.”¹¹

从这个角度来看，农业的出现不仅仅意味着饮食的变化；它还引发了经济生活和文化组织的巨大革命，以及暴力逻辑的转变。农业创造了大规模的土地资本资产，有时也创造了灌溉系统。农民饲养的农作物和家畜是宝贵的资产。它们可以被储存、囤积和偷窃。由于农作物必须在整个生长季节（从种植到收获）进行照料，因此远离威胁的迁移变得不那么有吸引力，特别是在干旱地区，那里种植农作物的机会仅限于有可靠水源的小块土地。随着逃跑变得越来越困难，有组织的敲诈勒索和抢劫的机会也增加了。农民在收获季节遭到袭击，这逐渐加剧了战争的规模。

Seen in this perspective, the advent of agriculture entailed more than a change in diet; it also launched a great revolution in the organization of economic life and culture as well as a transformation of the logic of violence. Farming created large-scale capital assets in land and sometimes in irrigation systems. The crops and domesticated animals farmers raised were valuable assets. They could be stored, hoarded, and stolen. Because crops had to be tended over the entire growing season, from planting through harvest, migration away from threats became less attractive, especially in arid regions where opportunities to grow crops were confined to the small areas of the land with dependable water supplies. As escape became more difficult, opportunities for organized shakedowns and plunder increased. Farmers were subject to raids at harvesttime, which gradually raised the scale of warfare.

这往往会扩大社会规模，因为暴力竞争往往由人数较多的群体获胜。随着对土地和土地产出控制权的竞争变得更加激烈，社会变得更加固定。劳动分工变得更加明显。就业和奴隶制首次出现。农民和牧民专门生产食物。陶工制作用于储存食物的容器。牧师祈求雨水和丰收。暴力专家，即政府的先驱，越来越多地致力于掠夺和保护免遭掠夺。他们和牧师一起成为历史上第一批富人。

This tended to increase the size of societies because contests of violence more often than not were won by the larger group. As competition over land and control of its output became more intense, societies became more stationary. A division of labor became more apparent. Employment and slavery arose for the first time. Farmers and herders specialized in producing food. Potters produced containers in which food was stored. Priests prayed for rain and bountiful harvests. Specialists in violence, the forefathers of government, increasingly devoted themselves to plunder and protection from plunder. Along with the priests, they became the first wealthy persons in history.

在农业社会的早期阶段，这些战士控制了一部分年度作物作为保护的代价。在威胁最小的地方，自耕农有时能够保持相对较大的自主权。但随着人口密度的上升，对粮食的竞争加剧，特别是在沙漠周围土地稀缺的地区，战士群体可以占据总产量的很大一部分。这些战士用这种抽成的收益建立了第一个国家，这些抽成高达粮食产量的 25% 和家畜数量增加的一半。因此，农业极大地增加了强制手段的重要性。可供掠夺的资源激增导致掠夺激增。

In the early stages of agricultural societies, these warriors came to control a portion of the annual crop as a price of protection. In places where threats were minimal, yeoman farmers were sometimes able to retain a relatively large degree of autonomy. But as population densities rose, and competition over food intensified, especially in regions around deserts where productive land was at a premium, the warrior group could take a large fraction of total output. These warriors founded the first states with the proceeds of this rake-off, which reached as high as 25 percent of the grain crop and one-half the increase in herds of domesticated animals. Farming, therefore, dramatically increased the importance of coercion. The surge in resources capable of being plundered led to a large surge in plunder.

农业革命的整个逻辑花了数千年才得以实现。长期以来，温带地区人口稀少的农民可能过着和他们以觅食为生的祖先差不多的生活。在土地和降雨充足的地方，农民可以小规模地收割庄稼，不会受到太多暴力干扰。但随着人口在数千年的时间里不断增长，即使是人口稀少地区的农民也遭受了不定期的掠夺，有时他们没有足够的种子来重新种植来年的庄稼。竞争性掠夺或无政府状态是一种极端情况，以及没有任何专门组织垄断暴力的不受保护的社区。

It took millennia for the full logic of the Agricultural Revolution to play itself out. For a long while, sparse populations of farmers in temperate regions may have lived much as their foraging forebears had done. Where land and rainfall were ample, farmers harvested crops on a small scale without much violent interference. But as populations rose over a period of several thousand years, farmers even in thinly settled regions became subject to erratic plunder that sometimes must have left them with insufficient seed to replant the next year’s crop. Competitive plundering, or anarchy, was a possibility at one extreme, as well as unprotected communities living without any specialized organization to monopolize violence.

随着时间的推移，农业固有的暴力逻辑在越来越广泛的领域中得以实施。那些可以不受政府掠夺而继续进行农耕和放牧的地区逐渐退居到一些真正偏远的地区。举一个极端的例子，阿富汗的卡菲尔地区一直抵制政府的强加，直到十九世纪最后十年。但这样做，他们在几个世纪前就变成了一个相当好战的社会，按照亲属关系组织起来。这种安排无法大规模地集结力量。在英国人把现代武器带到该地区之前，卡菲尔人一直独立生活在他们偏远的巴什加尔以及瓦伊加尔山谷，因为这些山谷的堡垒受到地形、高山和沙漠的保护，这些地形、高山和沙漠将他们与外部征服者隔开^。12

As time passed, the logic of violence inherent in agriculture imposed itself over an ever-wider terrain. The regions where farming and herding could continue without the predations of government receded to a few truly remote areas. The Kafir regions of Afghanistan, to cite an extreme example, resisted the imposition of government until the last decade of the nineteenth century. But in so doing, they were transformed centuries earlier into a quite militant society, organized along kinship lines. Such arrangements were not capable of mustering force on a large scale. Until the British brought modern weapons to the region, the Kafirs remained independent in their remote Bashgal and Waigal valleys because their redoubts were protected by features of topography, high mountains, and deserts that stood between them and conquerors from the outside.¹²

随着时间的推移，农业革命的基本逻辑在农业盛行的社会中留下了深刻的印象。农业极大地提高了人类社区的形成规模。大约一万年前，城市开始出现。尽管以今天的标准来看，城市规模很小，但它们却是第一批“文明”的中心。“文明”一词源于拉丁语“ civitas”，意为“公民”或“城市居民”。由于农业创造了可供掠夺和保护的资产，因此也产生了对库存会计的要求。除非你能编制记录并开具收据，否则你无法征税。会计账簿中使用的符号成为书面语言的雏形，这是狩猎者和采集者从未有过的创新。

Over time, the basic logic of the Agricultural Revolution impressed itself on the societies where farming took hold. Farming sharply raised the scale at which human communities could form. Beginning about ten thousand years ago, cities began to emerge. Although tiny by today's standards, they were the centers of the first “civilizations,” a word derived from civitas, which means “citizenship” or “inhabitants of a city” in Latin. Because farming created assets to plunder and to protect, it also created a requirement for inventory accounting. You cannot tax unless you can compile records and issue receipts. The symbols employed in the accountant's ledger became the rudiments of written language, an innovation that had never existed among hunters and gatherers.

农耕也扩大了人类解决问题的视野。狩猎群体生活在一个直接的时间范围内。他们很少从事持续几天以上的项目。但种植和收获庄稼需要几个月的时间。从事更长时间的项目使农民将注意力集中在星象上。详细的天文观测是编制年鉴和日历的先决条件，以指导何时种植和收获最好。随着农耕的出现，人类的视野扩大了。

Farming also extended the horizon over which humans had to solve problems. Hunting bands lived within an immediate time horizon. They seldom undertook projects that lasted more than a few days. But planting and harvesting a crop took months. Pursuing projects of a longer time frame led farmers to train their attentions on the stars. Detailed astronomical observations were a precondition for drawing up almanacs and calendars to serve as guides on when to best plant and reap. With the advent of farming, human horizons expanded.

财产​

PROPERTY

向定居农业社会的转变导致了私有财产的出现。显然，没有人会满足于在整个生长季节辛苦劳作以生产出庄稼，只是为了看到别人闲逛并收获他所生产的东西。财产的概念是农业的必然结果。但是，随着农业的引入，暴力逻辑削弱了私有财产概念的清晰度。财产的出现被这样一个事实所混淆：个人的超级政治权力不再像在觅食社会中那样平等，在觅食社会中，每个健康的成年男性都是猎人，与其他人一样装备精良。农业导致了暴力的专业化。正是因为它创造了可以偷的东西，农业使投资于更好的武器变得有利可图。结果就是盗窃，其中大部分是高度有组织的盗窃。

The move to a settled agricultural society resulted in the emergence of private property. Obviously, no one would be content to toil through the whole growing season to produce a crop just to see someone else wander along and harvest what he produced. The idea of property emerged as an inevitable consequence of farming. But the clarity of private property as a concept was attenuated by the logic of violence that also accompanied the introduction of farming. The emergence of property was confused by the fact that the megapolitical power of individuals was no longer as equal as it had been in foraging societies, where every healthy adult male was a hunter, as well armed as anyone else. Farming gave rise to specialization in violence. Precisely because it created something to steal, farming made investments in better weaponry profitable. The result was theft, much of it highly organized.

有权势的人现在能够组织一种新的掠夺形式：暴力或政府的当地垄断。这种社会分化严重，为从掠夺中获益的人和耕种土地的穷人创造了截然不同的境况。少数控制军事强人现在可以和得到他们恩惠的人一起变得富有。统治早期近东国家的神王和他们的盟友，即各种较小的地方君主，享有的财产形式比在他们手下辛苦劳作的广大群众要现代得多。

The powerful were now able to organize a new form of predation: a local monopoly of violence, or government. This sharply differentiated society, creating quite different circumstances for those who benefited from the plunder, and the mass of poor who tilled the fields. The few who controlled military power could now become rich, along with others who found favor with them. The god-kings and their allies, the various lesser, local potentates who ruled the first Near Eastern states, enjoyed much more nearly modern forms of property than the great mass who toiled beneath them.

当然，在早期农业社会中，认为私人财富和公共财富之间存在区别是过时的。统治的神王可以支配国家的全部资源，这与拥有庞大的庄园几乎没有区别。就像欧洲历史上的封建时期一样，所有财产都受制于高级君主的统治。等级制度下的人会发现他们的财产会随着统治者的意愿而减少。

Of course, it is anachronistic to think of a distinction between private and public wealth in the early agricultural societies. The ruling god-king had the full resources of the state at his disposal in a way that could hardly be distinguished from ownership of a sprawling estate. Much as in the feudal period of European history, all property was subject to the overlordship of higher potentates. Those down the chain of hierarchy found their property subject to attenuation at the whim of the ruler.

然而，说君主不受法律约束并不意味着他可以随心所欲地攫取任何东西。成本和回报对法老自由的侵犯，就像今天对加拿大总理的侵犯一样。与当代领导人相比，法老受到交通和通讯困难的制约更大。仅仅将战利品从一个地方运到另一个地方，尤其是当战利品主要以农产品的形式衡量时，就会造成大量腐败和盗窃损失。官员的增多可以相互监督，这减少了盗窃造成的损失，但增加了法老必须承担的总管理费用。权力分散在某些情况下可以优化产出，但也催生了更强大的地方权力，这些权力有时会发展成为王朝控制权的全面挑战者。即使是东方的专制君主也绝不能随心所欲。他们别无选择，只能承认他们所发现的原始权力的平衡。

Yet to say that the potentate was not restrained by law does not mean that he could afford to seize anything he pleased. Costs and rewards impinged upon the freedom of the pharaoh as much as they do today upon the prime minister of Canada. And the pharaoh was much more constrained than contemporary leaders by the difficulties of transport and communication. Simply hauling loot from one spot to the next, especially when loot was measured mainly in the form of agricultural produce, involved a lot of loss from spoilage and theft. The proliferation of officials to check on one another reduced the loss due to pilfering but increased the total overhead costs the pharaoh had to bear. Decentralized authority, which optimized output under some circumstances, also gave rise to stronger local powers who sometimes blossomed into full-fledged challengers for dynastic control. Even Oriental despots were by no means free to do as they pleased. They had no choice but to recognize the balance of raw power as they found it.

尽管每个人，包括富人，都遭受到任意征用，但有些人还是能够积累自己的财产。当时和现在一样，国家将大部分收入用于公共工程。灌溉系统、宗教纪念碑和国王墓穴等项目为建筑师和工匠提供了赚钱的机会。一些处境良好的人能够积累大量私人财产。事实上，早期美索不达米亚文明苏美尔现存的大部分楔形文字板记录了各种贸易行为，其中大部分涉及产权转让。

Although everyone, including the rich, was subject to arbitrary expropriation, some were able to accumulate property of their own. Then as now, the state devoted much of its income to public works. Projects such as irrigation systems, religious monuments, and crypts for the kings provided opportunities for architects and artisans to earn income. Some well-situated individuals were able to accumulate considerable private property. In fact, a large portion of the surviving cuneiform tablets from Sumer, an early Mesopotamian civilization, record various acts of trade, most of which involve the transfer of property titles.

早期农业社会中存在私有财产，但社会金字塔底层的人很少拥有私有财产。绝大多数人口都是农民，他们太穷了，无法积累太多财富。事实上，除了少数例外，直到现代，大多数农民都非常贫穷，只要旱灾、洪灾或虫害导致农作物减产，他们就随时面临饿死的危险。因此，农民不得不以一种方式组织他们的事务，以尽量减少歉收年景带来的不利风险。在广大贫困阶层中，社会，获得了更原始的财产组织。它增加了生存的机会，但代价是剥夺了大部分积累资本和在经济体系中崛起的机会。

There was private property in the early agricultural societies, but seldom at the bottom of the social pyramid. The overwhelming majority of the population were peasants who were too poor to accumulate much wealth. In fact, with a few exceptions, most peasants, up until modern times, were so poor that they stood in constant danger of perishing from starvation any time that a drought or a flood or an infestation reduced crop yields. Hence the peasants were obliged to organize their affairs in a way that minimized the downside risks in bad years. Across the broad and impoverished stratum of society, a more primitive organization of property obtained. It increased the chance of survival at the expense of foreclosing the greater part of the opportunity to accumulate capital and rise in the economic system.

农民保险

Peasant Insurance

这种交易的形式是人类学家和社会历史学家所描述的“封闭村庄”。前现代时期，几乎每个农民社会的主要经济组织形式都是“封闭村庄”。与更现代的经济组织形式不同，在更现代的经济组织形式中，个人往往在开放的市场上与许多买家和卖家打交道，而封闭村庄的家庭联合起来，像一个非正式的公司或大家族一样运作，不是在开放的市场，而是在一个封闭的系统中，村庄的所有经济交易往往由一个垄断者——当地地主或他在村长中的代理人达成。整个村庄会与地主签订合同，通常以实物支付大部分农作物，而不是固定租金。按比例租金意味着地主承担了歉收的部分下行风险。当然，地主也获得了大部分潜在利润。地主通常还提供种子。

The form that this bargain took was the adoption of what anthropologists and social historians describe as the “closed village.” Almost every peasant society in premodern times had, as its main form of economic organization, the “closed village.” Unlike more modern forms of economic organization, in which individuals tend to deal with many buyers and sellers in an open market, the households of the closed village joined together to operate like an informal corporation, or a large family, not in an open marketplace but in a closed system where all the economic transactions of the village tended to be struck with a single monopolist—the local landlord, or his agents among the village chiefs. The village as a whole would contract with the landlord, usually for payment in kind, for a high proportion of the crop, rather than a fixed rent. The proportional rent meant that the landlord absorbed part of the downside risk of a bad harvest. Of course, the landlord also took the greater part of the potential profit. Landlords also typically provided seed.

这一惯例也使饥饿的危险降到最低。它要求地主而不是农民将自己收获的那部分不成比例的份额存起来。由于过去许多地区的农业产量低得惊人，每收获三颗种子，就必须种植两颗种子。在这种情况下，歉收将意味着大规模饥荒。农民理性地选择了这样一种安排，即要求地主投资于他们的生存。以垄断价格购买、低价出售，并为地主提供实物劳动力为代价，农民增加了生存的机会。类似的冲动导致封闭的乡村经济中的典型农民放弃了永久产权的保障。通过把自己交给村长，农民家庭提高了从定期重新分配土地中获益的机会。村长经常会把最好的土地留给自己和他最喜欢的人。但这是农民必须忍受的风险，以便享受混乱的村庄土地所有权所提供的生存保险。在农作物产量极低的时候，相隔一百码的田地生长条件的差异就可能造成饥饿和生存之间的差别。农民经常选择降低下行风险的安排，即使为此放弃任何增加繁荣的希望。

This convention also minimized the danger of starvation. It required that the landlord, rather than the peasant, save a disproportionate share of his part of the harvest. Because agricultural yields were appallingly low in many areas in the past, as many as two seeds had to be planted for every three harvested. Under such conditions, a bad harvest would mean mass starvation. The peasants rationally preferred an arrangement which would require the landlord to invest in their survival. At the cost of buying at monopolized prices, selling cheaply, and providing the landlord with in-kind labor, the peasants increased their chances of survival. A similar impulse led the typical peasant in a closed village economy to forgo the security of freehold property ownership. By putting themselves at the mercy of the village head-man, a peasant family improved its chances of benefiting from the regular redistribution of fields. Not infrequently, the headman would take the best fields for himself and his favorites. But that was a risk that peasants had to tolerate in order to enjoy the survival insurance that confused village ownership of fields provided. At times when crop yields were miserably low, a difference in growing conditions of fields a hundred yards apart could make the difference between starvation and survival. Peasants frequently opted for the arrangement that lowered the downside risk, even at the cost of forgoing any hope of increased prosperity.

总体而言，规避风险的行为在所有在生存边缘运作的群体中都很常见。前现代社会总是限制穷人的行为。《大清算》探讨了这种风险规避的一个有趣特征，即它减少了社会^允许个人采取的和平经济行为的范围。禁忌和社会限制限制了实验和创新行为，即使显然要付出放弃现有做事方式可能带来有利改进的代价。13这合理地反映了实验增加了结果的可变性这一事实。更大的可变性不仅意味着可能获得更大的收益，而且——对于那些处于生存边缘的人来说更不祥——可能造成毁灭性的损失。贫穷农业社会的文化能量很大一部分一直用于压制实验。这种压制实际上是保险政策的替代品。如果他们有保险，或者有足够的储蓄来为他们的实验提供自我保险，那么就不需要如此强烈的社会禁忌来帮助确保生存。

In general, risk-averse behavior has been common among all groups that operated along the margins of survival. The sheer challenge of survival in premodern societies always constrained the behavior of the poor. An interesting feature of this risk aversion, explored in The Great Reckoning, is that it reduced the range of peaceful economic behavior that individuals were socially permitted to adopt. Taboos and social constraints limited experimentation and innovative behavior, even at the obvious cost of forgoing potentially advantageous improvements in settled ways of doing things.¹³ This was a rational reflection of the fact that experimentation increases the variability of results. Greater variability means not only potentially greater gains but—more ominously for those at the very margin of survival—potentially ruinous losses. A great part of the cultural energy of poor farming societies has always been devoted to suppressing experimentation. This repression, in effect, was their substitute for insurance policies. If they had insurance, or sufficient savings to self-insure their experiments, such strong social taboos would not be needed to help ensure survival.

文化不是品味问题，而是适应特定环境的系统，在其他环境中可能无关紧要，甚至适得其反。人类生活在各种各样的栖息地中。我们生活的潜在环境数量众多，需要行为的变化，而这些变化太复杂，无法凭直觉来决定。因此，行为是文化编程的。对于许多农业社会中的绝大多数人来说，文化编程是为了生存，但仅仅是为了在其他人享有参与开放市场的特权的环境中生存。

Cultures are not matters of taste but systems of adaptation to specific circumstances that may prove irrelevant or even counterproductive in other settings. Humans live in a wide variety of habitats. The wide number of potential niches in which we live require variations in behavior that are too complex to be informed by instinct. Therefore, behavior is culturally programmed. For the vast majority in many agricultural societies, culture programmed them for survival, but little more than survival in an environment where the luxury of participating in open markets was reserved to others.

个人能力和个人选择——现代意义上的个人“追求幸福”——受到禁忌和社会限制的压制，而这些禁忌和社会限制在穷人中一直最为突出。在生产力有限的社会中，这种限制很难被取代。在农业生产力较高的地方，如古希腊，发生了小规模的政治革命。财产以更现代的形式出现。出现了“Allod”或永久产权。土地往往以固定费用出租，如果收成好，佃户承担经济风险，并获得更高比例的利润。更高的储蓄允许自保风险更大的行为。在这种情况下，自耕农可以超越农民的地位，有时甚至可以积累独立的财富。

Personal ability and personal choice—individual “pursuit of happiness,” in the modern sense—were suppressed by taboos and social restrictions that have always been most emphatic among the poor. Such restrictions were superseded only with great difficulty in societies with limited productivity. When and where agricultural productivity was higher, such as in ancient Greece, minor megapolitical revolutions occurred. Property took more modern forms. “Allod,” or freehold property, emerged. Lands tended to rent for a fixed fee, and the tenant absorbed the economic risk as well as a higher portion of the profit if the crop was good. Higher savings allow self-insurance of riskier behavior. Under such conditions, yeoman farmers could rise above the rank of peasantry and sometimes even accumulate independent wealth.

随着社会摆脱贫困，更市场化的产权和关系趋向于在经济等级制度的顶层发展，或者在极少数情况下，在整个经济中发展，这是社会组织的一个重要特征。同样重要的是，历史上最常见的农业社会组织本质上是封建的，市场关系在顶层，封闭的村庄体系在底层。广大农民被束缚在几乎所有前现代农业社会都存在土地短缺问题。只要农业生产力仍然很低，或者更高的生产力取决于能否使用集中式水力系统，底层个体农民的自由和财产权就仍然很小。在这种情况下，封建形式的财产占主导地位。土地是通过保有权而不是通过永久产权持有的。通常，出售、赠与和继承权受到限制。

The tendency for more market-like property rights and relationships to develop near the top of an economic hierarchy or, in rarer cases, across the whole economy, as societies emerged from poverty, is an important characteristic of social organization. It is equally important to note that the most common organization of agricultural society historically has been essentially feudal, with market relations at the top and the closed village system at the bottom. The great mass of peasants were tied to the land in almost all premodern agricultural societies. So long as agricultural productivity remained low, or higher productivity was dependent upon access to centralized hydraulic systems, the freedom and property rights of individual farmers at the bottom remained minimal. In such conditions, feudal forms of property prevailed. Land was held by tenure rather than through freehold title. Typically, rights of sale, gift, and inheritance were restricted.

各种形式的封建制度不仅是对始终存在的掠夺性暴力风险的一种回应，也是对生产力低得惊人的一种反应。在农业社会中，这两者往往是相辅相成的。两者往往相互促进。当公共权力崩溃时，财产权和繁荣往往会随之消退。生产力的崩溃也往往会削弱权力。虽然并非每一次干旱或不利的气候变化都会导致公共权力的崩溃，但许多干旱或不利的气候变化确实如此。

Feudalism in its various forms was not only a response to ever-present risks of predatory violence. It also was a reaction to appallingly low rates of productivity. The two have tended to go hand in hand in farming societies. Each frequently contributed to the other. When public authority collapsed, property rights and prosperity tended to recede accordingly. Collapsing productivity also tended to undermine authority. While not every drought or adverse climatic change resulted in the breakdown of public authority, many did.

公元1000年的封建革命​​​

THE FEUDAL REVOLUTION OF THE YEAR 1000

公元 1000 年的变革就是这种情况，它引发了封建革命。14当时，大政治和经济条件与我们现在所认为的中世纪条件有着重大差异。在罗马覆灭后^的最初几个世纪里，西欧经济萎靡不振。在前罗马帝国领土上扎根的日耳曼王国承担了罗马国家的许多职能，但规模要小得多。基础设施或多或少无人照管。几个世纪过去了，桥梁和渡槽年久失修，无法使用。罗马货币仍在使用，但几乎从流通中消失了。在罗马时代繁荣的土地市场或多或少枯竭了。曾经是罗马行政中心的城镇几乎与国家的征税权一起消失了。几乎所有其他文明装备也随之消失。

Such was the case with the transformation of the year 1000, which launched the feudal revolution.¹⁴ At that time, megapolitical and economic conditions differed in important ways from those we have come to think of as characterizing the Middle Ages. In the first few centuries after the fall of Rome, the economy of Western Europe withered. The Germanic kingdoms that took root in the territories of the former Roman Empire had assumed many functions of the Roman state, but at a much less ambitious level. Infrastructure more or less went untended. As the centuries passed, bridges and aqueducts fell into disrepair and became unusable. Roman coinage was still employed, but it practically disappeared from circulation. Land markets, which had thrived in Roman times, more or less dried up. Towns, which had been centers of Roman administration, virtually vanished along with the taxing power of the state. And so did almost every other accoutrement of civilization.

“黑暗时代”之所以被这样命名，是有原因的。识字率变得如此之低，以至于任何拥有读写能力的人都可以免于起诉，包括谋杀。罗马时代高度发达的艺术、科学和工程技术消失了。从道路建设到葡萄树和果树的嫁接，西欧停止使用许多曾经众所周知且高水准实践的技术。甚至像制陶轮这样古老的设备在许多地方也消失了。采矿业萎缩。冶金业衰退。地中海地区的灌溉工程由于疏于管理而瓦解。15^正如历史学家乔治·杜比所观察到的：“在公元 6 世纪末，欧洲是一个极其未开化的地方。” ¹⁶虽然在公元 800 年左右查理曼大帝统治下中央集权曾短暂复兴，但查理曼大帝去世后，一切很快又衰落了。

The “Dark Ages” were so named for a reason. Literacy became so rare that anyone who possessed the ability to read and write could expect immunity from prosecution for almost any crime, including murder. Artistic, scientific, and engineering skills that had been highly developed in Roman times disappeared. From road building to the grafting of vines and fruit trees, Western Europe ceased employing many techniques that had once been well known and practiced to a high standard. Even so ancient a device as the potter’s wheel disappeared in many places. Mining operations contracted. Metallurgy receded. Irrigation works in the Mediterranean region disintegrated through neglect.¹⁵ As historian Georges Duby observed, “At the end of the sixth century, Europe was a profoundly uncivilized place.”¹⁶ Although there was a brief renaissance of central authority under the rule of Charlemagne around the year 800, everything soon devolved again after his death.

这种凄凉景象的一个令人惊讶的必然结果是，罗马国家的崩溃很可能提高了小农户几个世纪的生活水平。黑暗时代统治西欧的日耳曼王国吸收了他们祖先部落的一些相对随和的社会特征，例如自由持有人的法律平等。因此，黑暗时代的小农户比封建时代自由得多。由此我们也可以推断他们更繁荣。正如我们在探索不同生产力条件下的财产形式的逻辑时所分析的那样，历史上，自由持有财产与小农户的相对繁荣是相辅相成的。封闭村庄和封建财产形式往往出现在小农户谋生能力更令人怀疑的地方。

A surprising corollary to this dreary landscape was the fact that the collapse of the Roman state probably raised the living standards of small farmers for several centuries. The Germanic kingdoms that dominated Western Europe during the Dark Ages incorporated some of the relatively easygoing social features common to their ancestral tribes, such as the legal equality of freeholders. As a consequence, small farmers in the Dark Ages were far freer than they were to be in the feudal centuries. By that we can also infer that they were more prosperous. As we analyzed above in exploring the logic of property forms under different conditions of productivity, freehold property has historically gone hand in hand with the relative prosperity of small farmers. The closed-village and feudal forms of property tended to emerge where the capacity of small farmers to make a living was more doubtful.

可以肯定的是，黑暗时代商业的崩溃使小农户失去了贸易的好处和更广阔的市场的优势。城镇的衰落破坏了现金经济，但也意味着农村人口不再需要承担沉重的官僚负担。正如 Guy Bois 所写，罗马城镇是一个寄生社区，而不是生产中心：“在罗马时期，城市的主要功能是政治秩序。它主要靠土地税从周围地区流入的收入维持生活……实际上，城镇几乎没有为周围的乡村生产任何东西。” ¹⁷罗马政权的崩溃在很大程度上使农村农民免于税收，税收吸走了“土地总产量的四分之一到三分之一，这还不包括小地主和中地主遭受的各种勒索。” ¹⁸税收非常繁重，有时甚至要强制执行，以至于业主抛弃财产的情况很普遍。野蛮人仁慈地允许这些税收失效。

To be sure, the virtual collapse of commerce during the Dark Ages cost small farmers the benefits of trade and advantages of wider markets. The demise of the towns undermined the cash economy, but it also meant the rural population was no longer called upon to support the crushing burden of bureaucracy. As Guy Bois has written, the Roman town was a parasitic community, not a center of production: “In the Roman period, the dominant function of a city was of a political order. It lived primarily from the revenues draining into it from its surroundings by the agency of the land tax.… The town, in effect, produced little or nothing for the benefit of the surrounding countryside.”¹⁷ The collapse of Roman authority largely freed farmers in the countryside from taxes, which had sucked away “between one quarter to one third of the gross product of the land, without counting the various exactions suffered by small and middling landowners.”¹⁸ The taxes were so onerous, sometimes enforced by execution, that desertion of property by owners was widespread. The barbarians mercifully allowed these taxes to lapse.

沙漠农业

Agri Deserti

蛮族的征服大大减轻了政府的负担，为穷人获得并保留永久产权创造了机会。罗马帝国末期，一些沙漠农场（agri deserti，即为逃避掠夺性税收而遗弃的农场）恢复了生产。尽管尽管当时的条件恶劣，农作物产量以现代标准来看低得可笑，黑暗时代却是欧洲小农户相对繁荣的时期。事实上，他们的地位比现代时代之前更高。首先，耕种肥沃土地的人手越来越少，大片土地都荒废了。瘟疫、战争以及逃离崩溃的罗马帝国的土地所有者的抛弃，使以前耕种的土​​地人口大幅减少。黑暗时代的小农户享有的另一个优势来自 6 世纪采用的新农业技术：重型犁，通常安装在轮子上。新技术与改良的马具配合使用，使农民能够使用多头牛，使清理北欧森林土地变得容易得多^。19

The burdens of government were so greatly reduced by the barbarian conquests that an opening was created for the poor to obtain freehold property and keep it. Some of the agri deserti, or deserted farms abandoned by owners fleeing predatory taxation in the final years of the Roman Empire, were brought back into production. Notwithstanding the rude circumstances of the time and the fact that crop yields were ridiculously low by modern standards, the Dark Ages were a period of relative prosperity for Europe’s smallholders. In fact, they were in a stronger position than they would be again until the modern era. For one thing, fewer hands were available to till the fertile land, large tracts of which had gone out of cultivation. Plagues, wars, and abandonment by owners escaping the collapsing Roman Empire had significantly depopulated areas previously under cultivation. Another advantage enjoyed by small farmers in the Dark Ages arose from the adoption in the sixth century of new farming technology: the heavy plow, often mounted on wheels. Used in tandem with an improved harness that allowed peasants to employ multiple oxen, the new technology made it much easier to clear forested land in Northern Europe.¹⁹

在这种情况下，土地市场几乎萎缩至零。只需清理土地，并与当地有关当局分享每块新土地的一部分，即可获得新的耕种用地。这一过程被称为“土地分让”，在罗马沦陷后的几个世纪里，它为人口增长提供了舒适的出路。在公元 8 世纪气温升高使农业生产率提高之后，土地分让在人口稀少的北部地区尤其具有吸引力。

Under such conditions, the market for land contracted almost to the vanishing point. New land for farming could be had merely by clearing it and sharing part of each new parcel with the appropriate local authorities. This process, known as assarting, gave a comfortable outlet for population growth for centuries after Rome fell. Assarting became particularly attractive in thinly populated northern regions after warmer temperatures in the eighth century made farming more productive.

征服前罗马领土的日耳曼部落首领已成为大地主。其余人口大多耕种小块土地——但条件与后来封建制度下的情况大不相同。较富裕的地主或主人约占人口的 7-10%。公元 1000 年之前，法国典型地区的三分之二村民似乎是自由保有土地的。20^他们拥有大约一半的耕地。21^农奴很少。Coloni或佃农占人口的比例不超过 5%。奴隶制仍然存在，但规模比罗马时代小得多。

The leaders of the Germanic tribes who conquered former Roman territories had established themselves as large landholders. Most of the rest of the population farmed small plots—but under conditions very different from those that came later under feudalism. Wealthier landowners, or masters, represented about 7-10 percent of the population. It appears that before the year 1000, two-thirds of the villagers in a typical area of France were freehold landowners.²⁰ They owned about half of all the land in cultivation.²¹ There were few serfs. Coloni, or tenant farmers, amounted to no more than 5 percent of the population. Slavery persisted, but on a much smaller scale than in Roman times.

罗马的日耳曼继承王国由所有自由人组成军事保卫队，他们在国王的当地代表伯爵的号召下集合起来拿起武器。即使是“中小业主”也应联合起来，派一人与步兵一起作战。22 秃头查理^在皮特雷敕令中命令所有有能力的人骑马集合。一个世纪前，教皇格里高利三世曾试图推进这一军事命令，于 732 年禁止人类食用马肉。23^但当时自由民步兵和骑兵在地位或法律上还没有什么区别。所有自由人都参加地方司法会议，可以向伯爵请愿解决争端，伯爵是自罗马晚期就存在的职位。当时没有贵族。

The Germanic successor kingdoms to Rome were defended militarily by all free men who assembled to bear arms on the call of the king’s local representative, the count. Even “small and middling proprietors” were expected to club together and send one of their number to fight with the infantry.²² In the Edict of Pitres, Charles the Bald ordered all those who could afford to do so to muster for battle on horseback. Pope Gregory III had attempted to advance this military imperative a century earlier by banning the human consumption of horsemeat in 732.²³ But there was as yet little distinction in status or law between the infantry of freeholders and the cavalry. All free men participated in local judicial assemblies and could petition for dispute settlement to the count, an office that had existed since late Roman times. There was no nobility as such.

“20 世纪 80 年代，一种新的大众社会现象突然出现在人们的视野中：社会向下流动。它的首批受害者是小地主。 ” ²⁴

—盖博斯​​

“A social phenomenon, new as a mass phenomenon, suddenly appeared on the horizons in the 980s: downward social mobility. Its first victims were the small allod-holders.”²⁴

—GUY BOIS

然而，随着黑暗时代的来临，罗马灭亡后，继承了日耳曼王国权力的自耕农和自由持有人之间的独立关系发生了一些变化，破坏了这些关系：

As the Dark Ages wore on, however, several things happened to destabilize the relationships that had preserved the independence of the yeoman farmers and freeholders in the Germanic kingdoms that inherited power after Rome’s fall:

1. 人口逐渐恢复，对土地使用造成更大压力。几个世纪以来，大部分最肥沃的无人认领土地被投入生产，尤其是在北欧促进了经济增长。相对于土地供应，农民人口不断增加，导致每个农民的劳动价值降低。大多数永久业权通过继承被分割成越来越小的地块。在黑暗时代，孩子们往往平等地分享父母的遗产。在人口增长的时期，土地所有权的分散往往使土地再次变得珍贵，并导致到 10 世纪中叶土地市场重新活跃起来。

1. Populations gradually recovered, placing greater pressures on the use of land. Over several centuries, much of the most fertile of the unclaimed land was brought into production, engendering growth in Northern Europe in particular. The increasing population of farmers relative to the supply of land made the labor of each farmer worth less. Most freehold titles were broken into ever smaller plots through inheritance. During the Dark Ages, children tended to share equally in the estates of their parents. The fragmentation of holdings at a time of rising population tended to place land at a premium once again and led to the re-emergence of active land markets by the mid-tenth century.

^2.在十世纪的最后几十年，气温突然下降，对农业产量造成了毁灭性的影响。982 年至 984 年，连续三次农作物歉收导致严重的饥荒。994 年，又一次农作物歉收后，饥荒再次来袭。25然后，在 997 年，农作物产量下降的问题又因一场瘟疫而加剧，这场瘟疫对小规模家庭农场的打击尤其严重，因为小规模农场主缺乏资源来替代失去家庭成员提供的劳动力。这些连续的农作物歉收和灾难首先导致自耕农负债累累。当产量无法恢复时，他们无法偿还抵押贷款。

2. In the final decades of the tenth century, temperatures suddenly turned colder, with a devastating impact on farm output. Three successive crop failures led to severe famine from 982 to 984. Famine struck again after another crop failure in 994.²⁵ Then, in 997, the problem of falling crop yields was compounded by a plague, which struck small family holdings with particular force because the smallholders lacked the resources to replace labor supplied by lost family members. These clustered crop failures and disasters at first led the yeoman farmers to sink into debt. When yields failed to recover they could not pay their mortgages.

3. 重装骑兵的重要性日益增加，权力关系逐渐不稳定。中世纪历史学家弗朗西斯·吉斯 (Frances Gies) 描述了装甲骑兵向中世纪骑士的转变：

3. Power relations were progressively destabilized by the growing importance of heavy cavalry. Medieval historian Frances Gies describes the transformation of the armored cavalryman into the medieval knight:

骑士原本是地位平庸的人物，凭借昂贵的马匹和盔甲，地位高于农民，他慢慢地提升了自己的社会地位，直到成为贵族。尽管骑士仍然是上流社会的最低等级，但骑士身份获得了独特的声望，使骑士成为大贵族甚至皇室都珍视的荣誉。这种声望主要是教会通过神圣化骑士授衔仪式和赞助一种被称为骑士精神的行为准则，将骑士身份基督教化的政策的产物，这种准则可能被违反的次数多于被遵守的次数，但对后人的思想和行为产生了不可否认的影响^。26

Originally a personality of mediocre status raised above the peasant by his expensive horse and armor, the knight slowly improved his position in society until he became part of the nobility. Although knights remained the lowest rank of the upper class, knighthood acquired a unique cachet that made knighting an honor prized by the great nobility and even royalty. The cachet was primarily the product of the Church’s policy of Christianizing knighthood by sanctifying the ceremony of knighting and by sponsoring a code of behavior known as chivalry, a code perhaps violated more often than honored, but exercising incontestable influence on the thought and conduct of posterity.²⁶

正如我们在《大清算》中所述，马镫的发明使骑马的武装骑士拥有了强大的攻击能力。他现在可以全速进攻，而不会因为长矛击中目标而从马鞍上摔下来。重骑兵的军事价值因一项亚洲发明而进一步提升，这项发明在十世纪传遍了西欧：钉铁马蹄铁。这进一步提高了马在路上的耐用性。27轮廓马鞍也提高了武装骑士的作战效率，它使携带重型武器更加容易，马刺和马衔铁使骑手可以在战斗时用一只手控制马匹。28 这些看似微不足道的技术创新加在一起，大大降低了小农的军事重要性，因为他们负担不起养战马和武装自己。专门为战争而^饲养的马匹中，最便宜的是大型战马，被称为“战马”，价值四头牛或四十只羊。更昂贵的战马要花十头牛或一百只羊。铠甲的价格也是小农户买不起的，相当于六十只羊的价格^。29

As we recounted in The Great Reckoning, the invention of the stirrup gave the armed knight on horseback a formidable assault capability. He could now attack at full speed and not be thrown from the saddle by the impact of his lance striking a target. The military value of the heavy cavalry was further enhanced by an Asian, invention that penetrated through Western Europe in the tenth century; the nailed iron horseshoe. This further improved the durability of the horse on the road.²⁷ Also adding to the improved effectiveness of the armed knight were the contoured saddle, which made it easier to wield heavy weapons, the spur, and the curb bit, which enabled a rider to control the horse with one hand while fighting.²⁸ Together, these apparently minor technological innovations dramatically devalued the military importance of the smallholders, who could not afford to maintain war-horses and arm themselves. The cheaper of the horses specially bred for war, the large chargers known as destriers, were worth four oxen or forty sheep. The more expensive warhorses cost ten oxen or one hundred sheep. Armor also cost a sum that no small holder could afford, equivalent to the price of sixty sheep.²⁹

4. 公元 1000 年之前天气变冷、农作物歉收、饥荒和瘟疫等事实也影响了人们的行为。许多人都相信世界末日或基督复临在即。虔诚或恐惧的土地所有者，无论大小，都将自己的土地捐献给教会，为世界末日做准备。

4. The fact that the colder weather, crop failures, famines, and plagues occurred during the run-up to the year 1000 also played a role in informing behavior. Many people were convinced that the end of the world or the Second Coming was at hand. Devout or frightened landowners, large and small, gave their land to the Church in preparation for apocalypse.

“只有穷人才会卖土地”

“Only a Poor Man Sells Land”

十世纪末的动荡局势为封建革命铺平了道路。连绵不断的农作物歉收和灾害导致自耕农负债累累。当农作物产量无法恢复时，自由持有人面临着绝望的处境。市场总是给最弱势的持有人施加最大的压力。事实上，这是他们美德的一部分。他们通过从弱势手中夺走资产来提高效率。但在十世纪末的欧洲，自给自足的农业几乎是唯一的职业。失去土地的家庭失去了唯一的生存手段。面对这种不愉快的前景，许多或大多数自由持有人决定在封建革命期间放弃他们的土地。用盖伊·博伊斯的话来说，“农民保住自己耕种的土地的唯一可靠方法是将土地所有权让渡给教会，这样他就可以保留土地的使用权。” ³⁰其他人将部分或全部土地割让给他们信任的富裕农民，无论是友好的邻居还是亲戚。

The unsettled conditions of the late tenth century paved the way for the feudal revolution. Clustered crop failures and disasters led the yeoman farmers to sink into debt. When crop yields failed to recover, the freeholders faced a desperate situation. Markets always place the greatest pressures on the weakest holders. Indeed, that is part of their virtue. They promote efficiency by removing assets from weak hands. But in late-tenth-century Europe, subsistence farming was practically the only occupation. Families who lost their land lost their only means of survival. Faced with this unpalatable prospect, many or most of the freehold farmers decided to give away their fields during the feudal revolution. In the words of Guy Bois, “The only sure way for a peasant to hold on to the land he tilled was to concede ownership of it to the Church, so he could retain its usufruct.”³⁰ Others ceded some or all of their land to wealthier farmers in whom they had confidence, either friendly neighbors or relatives.

这些财产转移的条件是，农民、他的家人和后代必须继续耕种土地。贫困农民也将享受到更为丰厚的支持。持有者，现在的“贵族”有能力购买马匹和盔甲，从而为扩大的庄园提供保护。从新农奴的角度来看，这种交易可以看作是继续经济所有权和丧失抵押品赎回权之间的中间点。通常，这是他无法拒绝的交易。

These property transfers were made on the condition that the farmer, his family, and his descendants were to remain to work the fields. The poor farmers were also to enjoy the reciprocal support of the more substantial holders, now the “nobles” who were able to afford horse and armor, and thus provide protection to the enlarged estates. Such a bargain can be seen from the new serf’s point of view as a halfway station between continuing economic ownership and foreclosure. More often than not, it was a bargain he could not refuse.

生产力下降不仅使贫困农民陷入了绝望的经济困境，还引发了掠夺性暴力的激增，破坏了财产安全。那些没有资源来夺取马匹和饲料供应不足的人突然发现，他们和他们的财产不再安全。用现代的话来说，这就像你今天被迫用一种新型武器武装自己，但这样做的成本是 10 万美元。如果你付不起这个价钱，你就得任由那些有能力的人摆布。

Falling productivity not only placed poor farmers in a desperate economic dilemma; it also instigated an upsurge in predatory violence that undermined the security of property. Those without the resources to wrest a share of the available and inadequate supply of horses and fodder suddenly found that they and their property were no longer safe. To put their dilemma in contemporary terms, it was as if you were forced to arm yourself today with a new type of weapon, but the cost of doing so was $100,000. If you could not pay that price, you would be at the mercy of those who could.

几年之内，国王和法院执行秩序的能力就崩溃了。31^现在，任何拥有盔甲和马匹的人都可以自行制定法律。结果就是出现了十世纪末版的《银翼杀手》，一场混战和抢劫，而法定当局无力阻止。武装骑士的抢劫和袭击扰乱了乡村。然而，这场劫掠的受害者并非全都是穷人，这一点并不明显。相反，大地主中的老年人、体质较弱的人或准备不足的人更适合成为目标。他们有更多东西可以偷。

Within a few years, the capacity of the king and the courts to enforce order collapsed.³¹ Anyone with armor and a horse could now become a law unto himself. The result was a late-tenth-century version of Blade Runner, a melee of fighting and plunder that the constituted authorities were powerless to stop. Looting and attacks by armed knights disrupted the countryside. It is by no means obvious, however, that all the victims of this pillage were the poor. To the contrary, the elderly, physically weaker, or ill-prepared among the larger landholders made more attractive targets. They had more to steal.

这件事发生在寒冷天气、饥荒和瘟疫使资源紧张的时刻，这并非巧合。导致权力崩溃的超级政治条件已经存在了一段时间。然而，直到危机爆发，它们才意识到改变社会权力关系的潜力。农作物歉收和饥荒似乎就是造成这种结果的原因。虽然很难重建事件的确切顺序，但似乎抢劫至少部分是由绝望的条件引起的。暴力事件爆发后，显然没有人能够调动军队来阻止它。绝大多数装备简陋的农民当然无能为力。即使是几十名步行的农民也会被一个骑在马背上的武装骑士打败。自由保有的农民，就像法定当局、国王和他们的伯爵一样，无力阻止当地土地被武装战士夺取。

It was not a coincidence that this happened at the very moment when colder weather, famine, and plague were placing a pinch on resources. The megapolitical conditions conducive to the breakdown of authority had been in place for some time. Their potential for altering the power relations in society was not realized, however, until a crisis was triggered. Crop failures and famines appear to have done just that. While the exact sequence of events is difficult to reconstruct, it appears that the looting was instigated, at least in part, by desperate conditions. Once the violence was unleashed, it became evident that no one could mobilize the force to stop it. The vast majority of poorly armed farmers certainly could do little. Even dozens of farmers on foot would have been outmatched by a single armed knight on horseback. The freehold farmers, like the constituted authorities, the kings with their counts, were powerless to prevent local land from being seized by armed warriors.

“上帝所赐的平安”

“The Peace of God”

在这种绝望的情况下，教会通过努力在暴力乡村谈判停战，帮助建立了封建制度。历史学家盖伊·博伊斯这样描述当时的情况：“政治当局无能为力，教会代替他们试图恢复秩序，这场运动被称为“上帝的和平”。和平委员会宣布了一系列禁令，这些禁令得到了诅咒的批准；庞大的“和平集会”得到了战士们的宣誓。这场运动起源于法国南部（989 年的沙鲁会议，990 年的纳博讷会议），然后逐渐传播开来。…” ³²

In these desperate conditions, the Church helped to launch feudalism through its efforts to negotiate a truce in the violent countryside. Historian Guy Bois described the situation this way: “The impotence of the political authorities was such that the Church stood in for them in the attempt to restore order, in the movement known as ‘The Peace of God.’ ‘Councils of Peace’ proclaimed series of interdictions which were sanctioned by anathemas; vast ‘assemblies of peace’ received the oaths of the warriors. The movement originated in the French Midi (Council of Charroux in 989, Council of Narbonne in 990), then gradually spread.…”³²

教会达成的协议是承认武装骑士在当地社区的统治权，以换取停止或缓和暴力和抢劫。在十世纪末暴力激增之后，土地所有权突然被冠以“nobilis”或“miles”的称号，以示统治权。贵族作为一个独立的阶层是由封建革命创造的。几年前记录在同一个人身上的财产交易并没有列出这样的区别^。33

The bargain that the Church struck involved acknowledgment of the overlordship of armed knights in local communities in exchange for a cessation or tempering of the violence and looting. Land titles inscribed after the surge of violence in the late tenth century suddenly bore the title “nobilis” or “miles” as an indication of lordship. The nobility as a separate estate was created by the feudal revolution. Property transactions recorded to the same individuals only a few years earlier had listed no such distinction.³³

鉴于生产力下降和小农户的经济不安全，武装骑士的超级政治权力不可避免地导致了封建土地占有制的出现。到 11 世纪前 25 年末，自耕农已基本消失。他们的自由土地已缩减到以前的一小部分，现在只能兼职耕种。小农户或他们的后代是农奴，他们大部分时间都在封建领主、世俗领主和教会领主的庄园里劳作。

Given falling productivity and the economic insecurity of the smallholders, the megapolitical power of the armed knights led inevitably to property holdings by feudal tenure. By the end of the first quarter of the eleventh century, yeoman farmers had largely disappeared. Their freeholdings had shrunk to a fraction of their previous extent and were now being worked just part-time. The small farmers or their descendants were serfs who spent most of their time laboring on the estates of feudal lords, lay and ecclesiastical.

封建革命带来的秩序崩溃导致了行为的调整，从而强化了封建主义。其中之一就是城堡建设的激增。城堡最初出现在欧洲西北部，是 9 世纪维京人袭击之后的原始木结构。最初是加洛林王朝官员的指挥中心，封建革命后成为世袭财产。这些早期的堡垒比后来的要原始得多，但它们仍然很难攻击。一旦建成，城堡就很难被摧毁。随着它们开始遍布乡村，国王或他的伯爵越来越不可能有效地挑战领主在当地的霸权。

The breakdown of order that accompanied the feudal revolution led to adjustments in behavior which reinforced feudalism. Among them was a surge in castle building. Castles had first appeared in northwest Europe as primitive wooden structures in the wake of Viking raids in the ninth century. Originally command centers for Carolingian officials, they became hereditary possessions after the feudal revolution. These early redoubts were far more primitive than they would later become, but they were nonetheless difficult to attack. Once erected, castles were razed only with the greatest effort. As they began to dot the countryside, the castles made it ever more implausible that the king or his counts could effectively challenge the local supremacy of the lords.

教会对生产力的贡献

Contributions of the Church to Productivity

封建制度是农业社会在生产力低下时期对秩序崩溃的反应。在封建制度的早期阶段，教会发挥了重要的经济生产作用。教会的贡献包括：

Feudalism was the response of agricultural society to the collapse of order at a time of low productivity. During the early stages of feudalism, the Church played an important and economically productive role. Among the Church’s contributions:

1. 在军事权力分散的环境中，教会具有独特的地位来维持和平并制定超越分散的地方主权的秩序规则。这是任何世俗权力都无法做到的工作。宗教权威 AR Radcliffe-Brown 的观察与此直接相关。他指出，“宗教的社会功能与其真假无关。”即使是那些“荒谬而令人厌恶的宗教，比如某些野蛮部落的宗教，也可能是社会机器中重要而有效的组成部分。” ³⁴在封建制度的早期阶段，教会的情况确实如此。它帮助制定规则，只有宗教才能做到这一点，使人们能够克服激励陷阱和行为困境。其中一些是人类生活中常见的道德困境，但其他一些则是当地困境，是当时的超级政治条件下独有的。中世纪教会在 10 世纪最后几年恢复农村秩序方面发挥了特殊作用。通过为地方当局提供宗教和仪式支持，教会降低了建立至少是薄弱的当地暴力垄断的成本。通过以这种方式帮助建立秩序，教会为最终导致更稳定的权力配置的条件做出了贡献。

1. In an environment where military power was decentralized, the Church was uniquely placed to maintain peace and develop rules of order that transcended fragmented, local sovereignties. This is a job that no secular power was positioned to do. The observations of the great religious authority A. R. Radcliffe-Brown are directly relevant here. He pointed out that “the social function of a religion is independent of its truth or falsity.” Even those that are “absurd and repulsive, such as those of some savage tribes, may be important and effective parts of the social machinery.”³⁴ This was certainly the case with the Church in the early stages of feudalism. It helped create rules, as only a religion could, that enabled people to overcome incentive traps and behavioral dilemmas. Some of these were moral dilemmas common to all human life. But others were local dilemmas, unique to the prevailing megapolitical conditions. The medieval Church had a special role to play in restoring order in the countryside in the final years of the tenth century. By providing religious and ceremonial support to local authorities, the Church lowered the costs of establishing at least weak local monopolies of violence. By helping to establish order in this way, the Church contributed to the conditions that ultimately led to more stable configurations of power.

此后很长一段时间，教会继续发挥作用，遏制私人战争和暴力过度行为，而这些行为是民政当局无法遏制的。教会相对于世俗当局的相对重要性反映在这样一个事实中：到 11 世纪，西欧大部分地区的主要行政权力划分变成了教区，而不是从罗马时代一直延续到中世纪的旧民政权力划分，即教区和帕古斯（城镇） ^。35

The Church continued to play a role for a long time thereafter in tempering the private wars and excesses of violence that otherwise could not be contained by civil authorities. The relative importance of the Church as opposed to secular authorities is reflected in the fact that by the eleventh century, the main administrative division of authority in most of Western Europe came to be the parish, rather than the old divisions of civil authority, the ager and pagus (town) that had persisted from Roman times through the Dark Ages.³⁵

2. 教会是保存和传播技术知识和信息的主要来源。教会资助大学，提供中世纪社会享有的最低限度的教育。教会还提供了复制书籍和手稿的机制，包括几乎所有关于农业和畜牧业的当代信息。本笃会修道院的抄写室可以理解为印刷机的替代技术，当时印刷机还不存在。尽管抄写室成本高昂、效率低下，但它们实际上是封建时期复制和保存书面知识的唯一机制。

2. The Church was the main source for preserving and transmitting technical knowledge and information. The Church sponsored universities and provided the minimal education that medieval society enjoyed. The Church also provided a mechanism for reproducing books and manuscripts, including almost all contemporary information about farming and husbandry. The scriptoria of the Benedictine monasteries can be understood as an alternate technology to printing presses, which did not yet exist. Costly and inefficient as the scriptoria were, they were practically the only mechanism for reproducing and preserving written knowledge in the feudal period.

3. 教会在提高欧洲农业生产力方面做出了巨大贡献，部分原因是它的农场经理识字。特别是在封建制度的早期阶段。在 13 世纪之前，世俗领主的农场经理几乎都是文盲，他们通过一套复杂的标记来记录。尽管他们可能是精明的农民，但他们无法从他们自己发明或亲眼看到的生产方法的任何改进中获益。因此，教会对于提高谷物、水果和种畜的质量至关重要。由于其在整个欧洲大陆拥有广泛的资产，教会可以将产量最高的种子和种畜送到产量落后的地区。北欧对圣餐葡萄酒的需求促使僧侣们尝试种植更耐寒的葡萄品种可以在寒冷气候下生存的作物。教会还通过其他方式帮助提高中世纪农业的生产力。封建革命期间，许多捐赠给教会的不经济的小块土地被重新配置，使其更易于耕种。教会还为小型农业社区提供所需的辅助服务。在许多地区，教会拥有的磨坊将谷物磨成面粉。

3. Partly because its farm managers were literate, the Church did a great deal to help improve the productivity of European farming, especially in the early stages of feudalism. Before the thirteenth century the farm managers of lay lords were almost all illiterates who kept records through an elaborate set of marks. Shrewd farmers though they may have been, they were in no position to benefit from any improvement in production methods that they could not invent themselves or see with their own eyes. The Church was therefore essential to improving the quality of grains, fruits, and breeding stock. Because of its extensive holdings spread over the entire European continent, the Church could send the most productive seed and breeding stock to areas where output lagged. The demand for sacramental wine in Northern Europe led monks to experiment with hardier varieties of grape that could survive in colder climates. The Church also helped raise the productivity of medieval farming in other ways. Many of the uneconomically small plots donated to the Church during the feudal revolution were reconfigured to make them easier to farm. The Church also provided ancillary services required by small farming communities. In many areas, Church-owned mills ground grain into flour.

4. 教会承担了许多如今被政府吸收的职能，包括提供公共基础设施。这是教会帮助克服经济学家在权力分散的时代所说的“公共物品困境”的方式之一。中世纪早期教会的特定宗教团体致力于应用工程任务，如开通道路、重建倒塌的桥梁和修复破旧的罗马渡槽。他们还清理土地、修建水坝和排干沼泽。一个新的修道会——迦太基修道会，在法国阿图瓦挖出了第一口“自流井”。他们用冲击钻挖了一个足够深的小洞，可以形成一口不需要水泵的水井。36^西多会修道会负责在欧洲低地国家修建和维护不稳定的海堤和堤坝。农民将土地转让给西多会修道院，然后租回，而僧侣们则承担全部维护和维修责任。西多会修士还率先发明了水力机械，并广泛用于“捶打、提升、研磨和压制”等。37^克莱尔沃修道院从奥布河开凿了一条两英里长的运河。38^教会还介入，在人口中心转移到古罗马驻军道路范围之外的地方修建新道路和桥梁。主教们向修建或修复渡河桥和为旅行者提供收容所的地方领主提供赦免。圣贝内泽建立的修道会，即“桥梁兄弟会”，建造了当时最长的几座桥梁，包括阿维尼翁桥，这是一座横跨罗纳河的巨大二十拱建筑，一端设有教堂和收费站。甚至一直矗立到十九世纪的伦敦桥也是由一位牧师修建的，部分资金来自教皇使节捐赠的 1,000 马克^。39

4. The Church undertook many functions that are today absorbed by government, including the provision of public infrastructure. This is part of the way that the Church helped overcome what economists call “public goods dilemmas” in an era of fragmented authority. Specific religious orders of the early-medieval Church devoted themselves to applied engineering tasks, like opening roads, rebuilding fallen bridges, and repairing dilapidated Roman aqueducts. They also cleared land, built dams, and drained swamps. A new monastic order, the Carthusians, dug the first “artesian” well in Artois, France. Using percussion drilling, they dug a small hole deep enough to create a well that needed no pump.³⁶ The Cistercian Order undertook to build and maintain precarious seawalls and dikes in the Low Countries of Europe. Farmers deeded land to Cistercian monasteries and then leased it back, while the monks undertook full responsibility for upkeep and repairs. Cistercians also took the lead in developing water-powered machines, which were adopted to such widespread uses as “pounding, lifting, grinding, and pressing.”³⁷ The monastery of Clairvaux dug a two-mile-long canal from the River Aube.³⁸ The Church also intervened to build new roads and bridges where population centers had shifted outside the range of the old Roman garrison roads. Bishops granted indulgences to local lords who would build or repair river crossings and maintain hospices for travelers. An order of monks established by St. Bénezet, the Frères Pontifes, or “Brothers of the Bridge,” built several of the longest bridges then existing, including the Pont d’Avignon, a massive twenty-arch structure over the Rhone with a combination chapel and tollbooth at one end. Even London Bridge, which stood until the nineteenth century, was constructed by a chaplain and financed in part by a contribution of 1,000 marks from the papal legate.³⁹

5. 教会还帮助培育了一个更为复杂的市场。例如，大教堂的建设与桥梁和渡槽等公共基础设施在类型上有所不同。至少在原则上，教堂建筑仅用于宗教服务，而不是商业通道。然而，不应忘记，教堂和大教堂的建设有助于创造和深化许多手工艺和工程技能的市场。就像冷战期间民族国家的军事开支无意中帮助培育了互联网一样，中世纪大教堂的建设也导致了其他类型的衍生品，即商业的孵化。教会是建筑行业和工匠的主要客户。教会购买用于圣餐仪式的银器、烛台以及用于装饰教堂的艺术品有助于创造奢侈品市场，而如果没有这些市场，奢侈品市场将不会存在。

5. The Church also helped incubate a more complex market. Cathedral construction, for example, differs in kind from public infrastructure, like bridges and aqueducts. In principle, at least, Church structures were used only for religious services and not as thoroughfares for commerce. Yet it should not be forgotten that construction of churches and cathedrals helped create and deepen markets for many artisanal and engineering skills. In the same way that military spending of the nation-state during the Cold War unintentionally helped incubate the Internet, so the building of medieval cathedrals led to spin-offs of other kinds, the incubation of commerce. The Church was a principal customer of the building trades and artisans. Church purchases of silver for communion services, candelabra, and artworks to decorate churches helped to create a market for luxury goods that otherwise would not have existed.

在“封建革命”期间和之后，教会在许多方面帮助缓和了武装骑士发动的暴力。特别是在封建制度的早期几个世纪，教会为提高农业经济的生产力做出了巨大贡献。它是一个必不可少的机构，非常适合黑暗时代末期农业社会的需求。

In many ways, the Church helped to temper the ferocity of violence unleashed by armed knights during and after the “feudal revolution.” Especially in the early centuries of feudalism, the Church contributed significantly to improving the productivity of the farming economy. It was an essential institution, well fitted to the needs of agrarian society at the close of the Dark Ages.

易受暴力侵害

Vulnerability to Violence

在“三四十年的暴力动乱中，公元 1000 年的封建革命” ⁴⁰就像五个世纪前的罗马覆灭一样，是一个由各种因素复杂相互作用而引发的独特事件。然而，从某种意义上说，恶人（ mali homines）的胜利和他们所实施的压迫完美地反映了农业社会对暴力的本质脆弱性。与人类生存的觅食阶段相比，农业在有组织的暴力和压迫方面带来了质的飞跃。

In “[t]hirty or forty years of violent disturbances, the feudal revolution of the year 1000,”⁴⁰ like the fall of Rome five centuries earlier, was a unique event, caused by a complex interplay of influences. Yet in one respect, the triumph of mali homines (wicked men) and the oppressions they wrought perfectly reflect the essential vulnerability of agricultural society to violence. In contrast to the foraging phase of human existence, farming introduced a quantum leap in organized violence and oppression.

从最早开始，这种思想就反映在农耕民族的更激进的文化中。早期农业社会的神是雨神和洪水之神，其功能反映了这些社会对决定农作物产量的因素的关注。雨水或水的赐予者也常常是战神，最早的国王会向他们祈求，而他们首先是军阀^。41

From the very earliest, this was reflected in the more militant cultures of farming peoples. The gods of the early agricultural societies were gods of rainfall and flooding, whose functions reflected the preoccupations of those societies with factors that determined crop yields. The sender of rain or water was also often the god of war, invoked by the earliest kings, who were, above all else, warlords.⁴¹

农业与战争之间的密切联系反映在人们的宗教想象中，他们的生活因农业革命的创新而发生了改变。被逐出伊甸园可以看作是社会从觅食到农耕的转变的象征，从不劳而获地从大自然的恩赐中采摘食物的自由生活转变为辛苦劳作的生活。

The close connection between farming and warfare was reflected in the religious imagination of people whose lives were transformed by the innovations of the agricultural revolution. The expulsion from the Garden of Eden can be seen as a figurative account of the transformation of society from foraging to farming, from a free life with food picked from nature’s bounty with little work to a life of hard labor.

失乐园原声​​

PARADISE LOST

农耕使人类走上了一条全新的道路。第一批农民真正播下了文明的种子。他们的辛勤劳动带来了城市、军队、算术、天文学、地牢、葡萄酒和威士忌、文字、国王、奴隶制和战争。然而，尽管农耕给生活增添了种种戏剧性，但脱离原始经济似乎从一开始就不受欢迎。《创世纪》中保存的记载就是明证，它讲述了被逐出天堂的故事。圣经中伊甸园的寓言是对荒野觅食者所享受的安逸生活的美好回忆。学者们指出，“伊甸园”一词似乎源于苏美尔语中的“荒野”一词^。42

Farming set humanity on an entirely new course. The first farmers truly planted the seeds of civilization. From their toil came cities, armies, arithmetic, astronomy, dungeons, wine and whiskey, the written word, kings, slavery, and war. Yet notwithstanding all the drama that farming was to add to life, the shift away from the primeval economy appears to have been roundly unpopular from its earliest days. Witness the account preserved in the Book of Genesis, which tells the story of the expulsion from paradise. The biblical parable of the Garden of Eden is a fond recollection of the life of ease enjoyed by the forager in the wilderness. Scholars indicate that the word “Eden” appears to be derived from a Sumerian word for “wilderness.”⁴²

从自由、人迹罕至的荒野生活转变为定居于农耕村落的生活，这是一件令人深感遗憾的事情，不仅《圣经》对此有所描述，而且人类对早晨起床去工作的持续不满也体现在这一点上。正如斯蒂芬·博伊登在《生物学视角下的西方文明》中所写，伴随农耕而来的新生活方式是“进化的”。43^在农耕出现之前，数千代人类都像亚当在伊甸园那样生活，受到造物主的邀请：“园中各样树上的果子，你可以随意吃。”狩猎者和采集者无需照料庄稼，无需看管牛群，也无需纳税。就像流浪汉一样，采集者随心所欲地漂泊，几乎不劳作，也不听从任何人的指挥。

The transition from a free and sparsely settled life in the wild to a sedentary life in a farming village was a matter of deep regret, expressed not only in the Bible but also in humankind’s continuing grudge against getting up in the morning and going to work. As Stephen Boyden wrote in Western Civilization in Biological Perspective, the new way of living that accompanied farming was “evodeviant.”⁴³ Prior to the advent of farming, thousands of human generations lived as Adam did in Eden, at the invitation of his Maker: “Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat.” Hunters and gatherers had no crops to tend, no herd to watch, no taxes to pay. Like hoboes, foragers drifted where they pleased, worked little, and answered to no one.

随着农耕的兴起，一种新的生活方式开始了，而且条件更加紧迫。“地必给你长出荆棘和蒺藜来，你必吃田间的菜蔬，汗流满面才得糊口。”农耕是艰苦的工作。农耕之前的生活给人的印象是失去的天堂。

With farming, a new way of life began, and on altogether more pressing terms. “Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field; In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread.” Farming was hard work. The memory of life before farming was that of paradise lost.

农民创造了新的条件，大大改变了暴力的逻辑，这超出了他们的想象。《创世纪》将第一个杀人犯该隐描述为“耕地的人”，这并非巧合。事实上，正是《圣经》不可思议的预言力量的一部分，它的故事被托付给了牧羊人，他们很容易理解农业如何为暴力提供了杠杆。在几节经文中，圣经的叙述概括了花了数千年才实现的逻辑。农业是纠纷的温床。农业大规模地创造了固定资本，提高了暴力的回报，并大大增加了保护资产的挑战。农业首次使犯罪和政府支付成为可能。

More than they could have imagined, farmers created new conditions that drastically altered the logic of violence. It is not a coincidence that the Book of Genesis makes Cain, the first murderer, “a tiller of the ground.” Indeed, it is part of the uncanny prophetic power of the Bible that its story was entrusted to shepherds who readily understood how farming gave leverage to violence. In a few verses the biblical account encapsulates logic that took thousands of years to play out. Farming was an incubator of disputes. Farming created stationary capital on an extensive scale, raising the payoff from violence and dramatically increasing the challenge of protecting assets. Farming made both crime and government paying propositions for the first time.

第四章政治的最后日子 圣母教会的衰落与保姆国家的相似之处

CHAPTER 4 THE LAST DAYS OF POLITICS Parallels Between the Senile Decline of the Holy Mother Church and the Nanny State

“我还相信——并且希望——政治和经济在未来将不再像过去那样重要；到时候，我们目前在这些问题上的大多数争论将显得微不足道，毫无意义，就像中世纪最敏锐的头脑耗费精力进行的神学辩论一样。” ¹

—亚瑟·C·克拉克

“I also believe—and hope—that politics and economics will cease to be as important in the future as they have been in the past; the time will come when most of our present controversies on these matters will seem as trivial, or as meaningless, as the theological debates in which the keenest minds of the Middle Ages dissipated their energies.”¹

—ARTHUR C. CLARKE

谈论政治即将消亡，这注定会显得荒谬或乐观，这取决于你的心态。然而，这正是信息革命可能带来的。对于在一个充斥着政治的世纪中成长起来的读者来说，没有政治生活也能继续下去的想法可能显得异想天开，就如同声称人们只需从空气中吸收养分就能生存一样。然而，现代意义上的政治，即专注于控制和合理化国家权力，在很大程度上是一种现代发明。我们相信，它将随着现代世界的终结而终结，就像中世纪人们所关注的封建责任和义务的纠缠随着中世纪的终结而终结一样。在封建时期，正如历史学家马丁·范·克里维尔德指出，“政治并不存在（政治这一概念尚未被发明，而且只可追溯到 16 世纪）。” ²

To speak of the coming death of politics is bound to seem ridiculous or optimistic, depending on your disposition. Yet that is what the Information Revolution is likely to bring. For readers reared in a century saturated in politics, the idea that life could proceed without it may seem fanciful, the equivalent to claiming that one could live merely by absorbing nutrients from the air. Yet politics in the modern sense, as the preoccupation with controlling and rationalizing the power of the state, is mostly a modern invention. We believe it will end with the modern world just as the tangle of feudal duties and obligations that engrossed the attentions of people in the Middle Ages ended with the Middle Ages. During the feudal period, as historian Martin van Creveld points out, “politics did not exist (the very concept had yet to be invented, and dates back only to the sixteenth century).”²

认为我们现在所知道的政治在现代之前并不存在似乎令人惊讶，尤其是考虑到亚里士多德在亚历山大大帝时代写过一篇同名论文。但仔细看看。古代文献中使用的词语不一定是当代概念。亚里士多德还写了一篇题为《诡辩的驳斥》的文章，这个词在今天就像中世纪的政治一样毫无意义。这个词根本就没有人使用。它第一次出现在英语中可以追溯到 1529 年。3^即使在那时，“政治”似乎也是一个贬义词，源自古法语单词politique，用来描述“机会主义者和拖延者” ^。4

The thought that politics, as we now know it, did not exist prior to the modern period may seem surprising, especially given that Aristotle had written an essay of that title in the days of Alexander the Great. But look closely. Words used in ancient texts are not necessarily contemporary concepts. Aristotle also wrote an essay entitled Sophistical Refutations, a term about as meaningless today as Politics was in the Middle Ages. The word simply was not in use. Its first known appearance in English dates to 1529.³ Even then, “politics” appears to have been a pejorative, derived from an Old French word, politique, used to describe “opportunists and temporizers.”⁴

亚里士多德的潜在概念花了近两千年的时间才以我们现在所知道的意义出现。为什么？在现代世界能够将亚里士多德的话语付诸实践之前，需要超级政治条件来大幅提高暴力的回报。我们在《大清算》中分析过的火药革命就是这样。它使暴力的回报远远高于以往任何时候。这使得谁控制国家的问题变得比以往任何时候都更加重要。合乎逻辑且不可避免的是，政治是从控制急剧增加的权力战利品的斗争中产生的。

It took almost two thousand years for Aristotle’s latent concept to emerge with the meaning we now know. Why? Before the modern world could put Aristotle’s word to a meaningful use, megapolitical conditions were required that dramatically raised the returns to violence. The Gunpowder Revolution, which we analyzed in The Great Reckoning, did just that. It raised the returns to violence far above what they had ever been. This made the question of who controlled the state more important than it had ever been. Logically and inevitably, politics emerged from the struggle to control the sharply increased spoils of power.

政治始于五个世纪前的工业化初期。如今，它正在走向衰亡。全世界正掀起一股对政治和政客的普遍厌恶。白水事件的隐情和文森特·福斯特谋杀案的拙劣谋杀案引发了新闻和猜测。克林顿总统的众多丑闻也引发了这种厌恶。众议院邮政局主要议员贪污的报道也引发了这种厌恶。约翰·梅杰圈子里的丑闻导致辞职，法国也发生了类似的丑闻，波及了近两任总理爱德华·巴拉迪尔和阿兰·朱佩。意大利还爆出了更大的丑闻，七任总理的朱利奥·安德烈奥蒂被带到法庭接受审判，罪名包括与黑手党有联系以及下令谋杀调查记者米诺·佩科雷利。西班牙首相菲利佩·冈萨雷斯的名誉也因其他丑闻受损。 20 世纪 90 年代初期，日本有四位首相因腐败指控而下台。加拿大司法部在致瑞士当局的一封信中指控前总理布赖恩·马尔罗尼在向加拿大航空公司出售 18 亿加元的空客飞机的交易中收受回扣。^北约秘书长威利·克拉斯在腐败指控的阴影下被迫辞职。甚至在瑞典，副总理兼推定总理莫娜·萨林也因被指控使用政府信用卡购买尿布和其他家庭用品。在福利制度成熟的国家，几乎每个地方，人们都憎恨他们的政治领袖，这些国家一度被认为是治理良好的。

Politics began five centuries ago with the early stages of industrialism. Now it is dying. A widespread revulsion against politics and politicians is sweeping the world. You see it in news and speculation on the hidden details of Whitewater, and the poorly disguised murder of Vincent Foster. You see it in numerous other scandals touching President Bill Clinton. You see in it reports of embezzlement by leading congressmen from the House Post Office. You see it in scandals leading to resignations in John Major’s circle, and similar scandals in France, reaching two recent prime ministers, Eduard Balladur and Alain Juppe. Even larger scandals have been revealed in Italy, where-seven-time prime minister Giulio Andreotti was brought to the dock to stand trail on charges that included links to the Mafia and ordering the murder of Mino Pecorelli, an investigative journalist. Still other scandals have tarnished the reputation of Spanish prime minister Filipe Gonzales. Corruption allegations cost four Japanese prime ministers their jobs in the first five years of the 1990s. Canada’s Justice Department alleged in a letter to Swiss authorities that former prime minister Brian Mulroney had received kickbacks on a C$1.8 billion sale of Airbus planes to Air Canada.⁵ Willy Claes, the secretary-general of NATO, was forced to resign under a cloud of corruption allegations. Even in Sweden, Mona Sahlin, a deputy prime minister and presumptive prime minister, was forced to resign in the face of allegations that she used government credit cards to purchase diapers and other household goods. Almost everywhere you turn in countries with mature welfare states once thought of as well governed, people hate their political leaders.

蔑视作为领先指标

Disdain as a Leading Indicator

对腐败领导人的道德愤慨并非孤立的历史现象，而是变革的共同前兆。每当一个时代让位于另一个时代时，这种愤慨就会一次又一次地发生。每当技术变革将旧形式与新的经济推动力分离开来时，道德标准就会发生变化，人们开始越来越鄙视那些掌管旧制度的人。这种普遍的反感早在人们形成新的连贯的变革意识形态之前就已显现。在我们写作本文时，目前还没有证据表明人们明确拒绝政治。那将在以后出现。你们大多数同时代人还没有意识到没有政治的生活是可能的。我们在二十世纪最后几年所拥有的只是无言的蔑视。

Moral outrage against corrupt leaders is not an isolated historical phenomenon but a common precursor of change. It happens again and again whenever one era gives way to another. Whenever technological change has divorced the old forms from the new moving forces of the economy, moral standards shift, and people begin to treat those in command of the old institutions with growing disdain. This widespread revulsion comes into evidence well before people develop a new coherent ideology of change. As we write, there is as yet little evidence of an articulate rejection of politics. That will come later. It has not yet occurred to most of your contemporaries that a life without politics is possible. What we have in the final years of the twentieth century is inarticulate disdain.

15 世纪末也发生过类似的事情，但当时正在被削弱的是宗教而不是政治。尽管人们普遍相信“祭司职位的神圣性”，⁶但高级和低级神职人员都遭到极度蔑视——这与当今人们对政客和官僚的态度并无二致。人们普遍认为高级神职人员腐败、世俗、贪财。这并非毫无道理。15 世纪的几位教皇公开与私生子交往。低级神职人员在乡村和城镇中大量涌现，乞讨施舍，并经常向任何愿意付钱的人兜售上帝的恩典和对罪孽的宽恕，因此他们的地位甚至更低。

Something similar happened in the late fifteenth century, but at that time it was religion rather than politics that was in the process of being downsized. Notwithstanding popular belief in “the sacredness of the sacerdotal office,”⁶ both the higher and lower ranks of clergy were held in the utmost contempt —not unlike the popular attitude toward politicians and bureaucrats today. It was widely believed that the upper clergy were corrupt, worldly, and venal. And not without reason. Several fifteenth-century popes openly sported bastards. The lower clergy were held in even lower esteem as they proliferated in country and town, begging for alms and frequently offering to sell God’s grace and the forgiveness of sins to anyone who would put cash into the bargain.

在“表面虔诚的外壳” ⁷之下，是一个腐败且日益失灵的体系。早在有人敢说它不起作用之前，许多人就对那些掌管它的人失去了尊重。一种充斥着宗教、不区分精神和世俗的生活已经耗尽了它的可能性。早在路德把他的 95 条论纲钉在维滕贝格教堂大门上之前，它的终结就已经是不可避免的了。

Beneath the “crust of superficial piety”⁷ was a corrupt and increasingly dysfunctional system. Many lost respect for those who ran it, long before anyone dared to say that it did not work. A life saturated with religion, making no distinction between the spiritual and the temporal, had exhausted its possibilities. Its end was inevitable long before Luther nailed his 95 theses on the church door at Wittenberg.

世俗改革​​

A SECULAR REFORMATION

我们认为，对饱和政治的反应也走上了类似的道路。苏联的解体和对社会主义的否定是席卷全球的广泛去政治化模式的一部分。现在，最明显的是，人们对那些管理世界政府的人越来越蔑视。其推动因素之一只是他们意识到自己腐败，倾向于出卖政治困境的“赦罪券”，以换取竞选捐款或大宗商品交易方面的特殊帮助，从而充实自己的个人财务。

We believe that the reaction against saturation politics is following a similar path. The death of the Soviet Union and the repudiation of socialism are part of a broad pattern of depoliticization sweeping the world. This is now most evident in a growing contempt for those who run the world’s governments. It is driven only in part by the realization that they are corrupt, and prone to sell “indulgences” from political difficulty in exchange for campaign contributions or special help on commodity trades to subvene their personal finances.

人们对政客的反应也源于人们越来越认识到，他们付出巨大代价所做的很多事情都是徒劳的，就像组织另一次忏悔者赤脚在雪地里行进的朝圣之旅或在 15 世纪后期成立另一个托钵僧团体，都无法提高生产力或缓解生活水平的压力一样。

The reaction against politicians is also motivated by the widening realization that much of what they do at great cost is futile, in the same way that organizing another pilgrimage of penitents to march barefoot in the snow, or the founding of yet another order of mendicant monks in the late fifteenth century, could have done little to improve productivity or relieve pressures on living standards.

圣母教堂的最后日子

The Last Days of the Holy Mother Church

中世纪末期，作为一个机构的庞大教会已经变得老态龙钟，而且适得其反，与五个世纪前它对经济的积极贡献相比发生了显著变化。正如我们在上一章中探讨的那样，教会在十世纪末期发挥了主导作用，在建立秩序和促进经济从标志着黑暗时代结束的无政府状态中复苏方面发挥了主导作用。当时，教会对于构成西欧人口主体的大量小自由持有者和农奴的生存是必不可少的。到十五世纪末，教会已成为生产力的主要拖累因素。它强加给人民的负担正在降低生活水平。

At the end of the Middle Ages, the monolithic Church as an institution had grown senile and counterproductive, a marked change from its positive economic contribution five centuries earlier. As we explored in the last chapter, the Church played a leading role at the end of the tenth century in establishing order and facilitating economic recovery from the anarchy that marked the close of the Dark Ages. At that time, the Church was indispensable to the survival of large numbers of small freeholders and serfs who made up the bulk of the Western European population. By the end of the fifteenth century, the Church had become a major drag upon productivity. The burdens it imposed upon the population were pushing living standards down.

今天的民族国家也大体如此。这是对五个世纪前火药革命所创造的新的超级政治条件的必要适应。民族国家扩大了市场范围，取代了分散的地方当局，而当时更全面的贸易区带来了巨大的回报。当君主努力巩固权力时，欧洲几乎所有地方的商人都自发地与君主结盟，这一事实本身就充分证明了早期的民族国家有利于商业。它有助于减轻封建地主和地方巨头对商业施加的负担。

Much the same thing can be said of the nation-state today. It was a necessary adaptation to the new megapolitical conditions created by the Gunpowder Revolution five centuries ago. The nation-state widened the scope of markets and displaced fragmented local authorities at a time when more encompassing trading areas brought large returns. The fact that merchants almost everywhere in Europe spontaneously allied themselves to the monarch at the center as he maneuvered to consolidate authority is itself telling evidence that the nation-state in its early form was good for business. It helped lift the burdens on commerce imposed by feudal landlords and local magnates.

在一个暴力回报率高且不断上升的世界里，民族国家是一个有用的机构。但五个世纪后，随着这个千年即将结束，大政治条件已经发生了变化。暴力回报率正在下降，民族国家就像中世纪末期的教会一样，是一种时代错误，已经成为增长和生产力的拖累。

In a world where returns to violence were high and rising, the nation-state was a useful institution. But five centuries later, as this millennium draws to a close, megapolitical conditions have changed. Returns to violence are falling, and the nation-state, like the Church at the twilight of the Middle Ages, is an anachronism that has become a drag on growth and productivity.

就像当时的教会一样，今天的民族国家已经耗尽了它的可能性。它已经破产，是一个发展到极度衰老的机构。就像当时的教会一样，它已经作为社会组织的主要形式存在了五年几个世纪以来，民族国家一直存在。民族国家已经超越了当初的条件，已经到了衰落的阶段。而且它一定会衰落。技术正在引发权力运作的革命，这场革命将摧毁民族国家，就像火药武器和印刷机摧毁中世纪教会的垄断一样。

Like the Church then, the nation-state today has exhausted its possibilities. It is bankrupt, an institution grown to a senile extreme. Like the Church then, it has served as the dominant form of social organization for five centuries. Having outlived the conditions that brought it into existence, it is ripe for a fall. And fall it will. Technology is precipitating a revolution in the exercise of power that will destroy the nation-state just as assuredly as gunpowder weapons and the printing press destroyed the monopoly of the medieval Church.

如果我们的推理是正确的，民族国家将被新的主权形式所取代，其中一些形式在历史上是独一无二的，有些让人想起前现代世界的城邦和中世纪商业共和国。2000 年以后，旧事物将变成新事物。以前无法想象的事情将变得司空见惯。随着技术规模的下降，政府将发现他们必须像公司一样竞争收入，他们所收取的费用不得超过他们为付费用户提供的价值。这种变化的全部影响几乎是难以想象的。

If our reasoning is correct, the nation-state will be replaced by new forms of sovereignty, some of them unique in history, some reminiscent of the city-states and medieval merchant republics of the premodern world. What was old will be new after the year 2000. And what was unimaginable will be commonplace. As the scale of technology plunges, governments will find that they must compete like corporations for income, charging no more for their services than they are worth to the people who pay for them. The full implications of this change are all but unimaginable.

瘦身与现在​

THIN AND NOW

五百年前，也就是十五世纪初，人们可能也说过类似的话。当时和现在一样，西方文明正处于重大变革的门槛上。尽管几乎没有人知道，中世纪社会正在走向衰亡。它的衰亡既没有被广泛预期，也没有被理解。尽管如此，当时的主流情绪是深深的悲观。这在一个时代的末期很常见，因为传统的思想家感觉到事情正在分崩离析，以至于“猎鹰听不到猎鹰人的声音”。然而，他们的思维惯性往往太大，无法理解新兴权力配置的含义。中世纪历史学家约翰·胡伊津哈 (Johan Huizinga) 在谈到中世纪的衰落时写道：“十五世纪的编年史家几乎都是对时代绝对误解的受害者，他们没有注意到真正的推动力。” ⁸

Something similar might have been said five hundred years ago, at the turn of the fifteenth century. Then as now, Western civilization stood at the threshold of a momentous transformation. Although almost no one knew it, medieval society was dying. Its death was neither widely anticipated nor understood. Nonetheless, the prevailing mood was one of deep gloom. This is common at the end of an era, as conventional thinkers sense that things are falling apart, that “the falcon cannot hear the falconer.” Yet their mental inertia is often too great to comprehend the implications of the emerging configurations of power. Medieval historian Johan Huizinga wrote of the waning days of the Middle Ages, “The chroniclers of the fifteenth century have, nearly all, been the dupes of an absolute misappreciation of their times, of which the real moving forces escaped their attention.”⁸

背叛神话

Myths Betrayed

权力的基本动态发生重大变化，往往会使传统思想家感到困惑，因为它们揭露了那些为旧秩序辩解但缺乏任何真正解释力的神话。中世纪末期，就像现在一样，人们所接受的神话与现实之间存在着特别大的差距。正如赫伊津哈在谈到 15 世纪末的欧洲人时所说：“他们的整个思想体系都充斥着骑士统治世界的虚构。” ⁹这和当代假设一样，即世界由选票和人气竞赛统治。这两个命题都经不起仔细推敲。事实上，历史进程由民主决定的观点愿望的计数与中世纪的观念一样愚蠢，认为愿望的计数是由一种称为骑士精神的复杂礼仪准则决定的。

Major changes in the underlying dynamics of power tend to confound conventional thinkers because they expose myths that rationalize the old order but lack any real explanatory power. At the end of the Middle Ages, as now, there was a particularly wide gap between the received myths and reality. As Huizinga said of the Europeans in the late fifteenth century, “Their whole system of ideas was permeated by the fiction that chivalry ruled the world.”⁹ This has a close second in the contemporary assumption that it is ruled by votes and popularity contests. Neither proposition stands up to close scrutiny. Indeed, the idea that the course of history is determined by democratic tallies of wishes is every bit as silly as the medieval notion that it is determined by an elaborated code of manners called chivalry.

这种近乎异端的说法表明，传统思维与对晚期工业社会权力动态的现实把握相去甚远。这是我们在本书中仔细研究的问题。我们认为，投票是现代民族国家诞生的超级政治条件的结果，而不是原因。随着民族国家的发展，大众民主和公民权概念蓬勃发展。随着民族国家的衰落，它们也会衰落，这在华盛顿造成的沮丧丝毫不亚于五百年前勃艮第公爵宫廷中骑士精神的衰落。

The fact that saying so borders on heresy suggests how divorced conventional thinking is from a realistic grasp of the dynamics of power in late industrial society. It is an issue we examine closely in this book. In our view, voting was an effect rather than a cause of the megapolitical conditions that brought forth the modern nation-state. Mass democracy and the concept of citizenship flourished as the nation-state grew. They will falter as the nation-state falters, causing every bit as much dismay in Washington as the erosion of chivalry caused in the court of the duke of Burgundy five hundred years ago.

道德与公民身份的相似之处​​

PARALLELS BETWEEN CHIVALRY AND CITIZENSHIP

如果你能理解骑士誓言的重要性是如何以及为何随着社会向工业组织过渡而逐渐消失的，你就能更好地理解我们现在所知道的公民身份是如何在信息时代逐渐消失的。两者发挥着类似的作用。它们在两组截然不同的超级政治条件下促进了权力的行使。

If you can understand how and why the importance of chivalric oaths faded away with the transition to an industrial organization of society, you will be better positioned to see how citizenship as we now know it could fade away in the Information Age. Both served a similar function. They facilitated the exercise of power under two quite different sets of megapolitical conditions.

封建誓言盛行的时代，防御技术至高无上，主权四分五裂，私人和法人团体都有权行使军事权力。在火药革命之前，战争通常由小股武装人员进行。即使是最强大的君主也没有常备军。他们从他们的封臣（大领主）那里获得军事支持，而大领主又向他们的封臣（小领主）求助，而小领主又向他们的封臣（骑士）求助。整个效忠链沿着等级制度向下延伸，直到社会地位最低、被认为有资格持枪的人。

Feudal oaths prevailed at a time when defensive technology was paramount, sovereignties were fragmented, and private individuals and corporate bodies exercised military power in their own right. Before the Gunpowder Revolution, wars had normally been fought by small contingents of armed men. Even the most powerful monarchs did not have militum perpetuum, or standing armies. They drew their military support from their vassals, the greater lords, who in turn drew upon their vassals, the lesser lords, who in turn drew upon their vassals, the knights. The whole chain of allegiance carried down the hierarchy to the person of the meanest social standing who was considered worthy to bear arms.

一致还是分歧？

Uniforms or Divergences?

与现代军队不同，在公民权兴起之前，中世纪军队在战场上行进时并不穿着制服。相反，每个家臣或封臣、每个骑士、从男爵或不同等级的领主都有自己独特的制服，反映了他们在等级制度中的地位。与制服不同，存在着差异，强调了社会的垂直结构，每个岗位都不同。正如赫伊津哈所说，中世纪战士的特点是“外在的差异标志：制服、颜色、徽章、党派口号。” ¹⁰

Unlike a modern army, a medieval army before the rise of citizenship did not march on the field of battle outfitted in uniforms. To the contrary, each retainer or vassal, each knight, baronet, or lord of different degree had his own distinctive livery that reflected his place in the hierarchy. Instead of uniforms, there were divergences that emphasized the vertical structure of society in which each station was different. As Huizinga said, medieval warriors were distinguished by “outward signs of… divergences: liveries, colors, badges, party cries.”¹⁰

战争也并非只由政府或国家发动。正如马丁·范克里韦尔德指出，卡尔·冯·克劳塞维茨等战略家所定义的现代战争观念歪曲了前现代冲突的现实。范·克里韦尔德写道：

Nor were wars fought only by governments or nations. As Martin van Creveld has pointed out, modern notions of war, as stylized by strategists like Carl von Clausewitz, misrepresent the reality of premodern conflict. Van Creveld writes:

罗马灭亡后一千年间，各种社会实体发动了武装冲突。其中有蛮族部落、教会、各等级封建贵族、自由城市，甚至私人。当时的“军队”与我们今天所知道的军队完全不同；事实上，很难找到一个词来形容他们。战争是由一群身穿军装、跟随领主的家臣发动的^。11

For a thousand years after the fall of Rome, armed conflict was waged by different kinds of social entities. Among them were barbarian tribes, the Church, feudal barons of every rank, free cities, even private individuals. Nor were the “armies” of the period anything like those we know today; indeed, it is difficult to find a word that will do them justice. War was waged by shoals of retainers who donned military garb and followed their lord.¹¹

在这样的情况下，显然，让家臣“穿上军装，跟随”对领主来说至关重要。因此，骑士誓言备受重视。

Under such conditions, it was obviously crucial to the lord that his retainers actually “donned their military garb and followed.” Hence the heavy emphasis placed upon the chivalric oath.

中世纪骑士的荣誉和应征士兵的职责发挥着平行的作用。中世纪人对个人和教会宣誓，就像现代人对民族国家宣誓一样。违背誓言在中世纪等同于叛国罪。中世纪晚期的人们为了避免违背誓言而采取极端行动，正如数百万现代公民在世界大战中采取极端行动，冲向机枪阵地以履行公民的职责。

The honor of the medieval knight and the duty of the conscript soldier served parallel functions. The medieval man was bound by oaths to individuals and the Church in much the way that moderns are bound by citizenship to the nation-state. Violating an oath was the medieval equivalent of treason. People in late-medieval times went to extremes to avoid violating oaths, just as millions of modern citizens went to extremes in the World Wars, charging machine-gun nests to fulfill their duties as citizens.

骑士精神和公民精神都为简单的计算增加了一个额外的维度，否则，这种计算会阻止未受过教育的人走上战场，并在情况变得艰难时留在战场上。骑士精神和公民精神都促使人们杀人，冒着生命危险。只有那些受到领导机构大力支持的苛刻而夸张的价值观才能发挥这种作用。

Both chivalry and citizenship added an extra dimension to the simple calculus that would otherwise deter unindoctrinated human beings from going onto a battlefield and staying there when the going got rough. Chivalry and citizenship both led people to kill and to risk death. Only demanding and exaggerated values that are strongly reinforced by leading institutions can serve that function.

规避成本效益分析

Circumventing Cost-Benefit Analysis

任何系统的成功和生存都取决于它在冲突和危机时期调动军事力量的能力。显然，中世纪骑士或第一次世界大战中战壕中的士兵冒着生命危险做出的战斗决定不太可能经过冷静的成本效益计算。战争很少如此容易打，那些迄今为止首当其冲的战斗人员的奖励也很少会掩盖招募一支经济优化者冲上战场可能付出的成本。几乎每一场战争，事实上，大多数战役都有转折时刻。正如军事史学者所熟知的那样，失败和胜利之间的区别往往取决于单个士兵在执行任务时的英勇、勇敢和凶猛。如果战斗人员不愿意为一块不会牺牲的土地而牺牲，那么一旦战斗停止，他们就一文不值，那么他们很可能无法战胜势均力敌的敌人。

The success and survival of any system depends upon its capacity to marshal military effort in times of conflict and crisis. Obviously, the decision on the part of a medieval knight or a private in the trenches in World War I to risk his life in battle was not likely to be informed by a sober, cost-benefit calculation. Seldom are wars so easily fought, or do rewards for those who bear the brunt of the fighting so far overshadow the possible costs that an army of economic optimizers could be recruited to rush out to the battlefield. Almost every war and, indeed, most battles have moments in which the tide could turn on a heartbeat. As students of military history are well aware, the difference between defeat and victory is often told by the valor, bravery, and ferocity with which individual soldiers take up their task. If the men doing the fighting are not willing to die over a piece of ground that would not be worth a fig once the battle stops, then they probably will not prevail against an otherwise evenly matched foe.

这具有重要意义。主权国家在限制叛逃和鼓励军事行动方面越有效，就越有可能在军事上获胜。在战争中，最有用的价值体系会诱导人们以短期理性计算无法做到的方式行事。如果被派往战场的个人可以自由地计算自己的最大优势所在，并据此加入战斗或逃跑，那么任何组织都无法有效地动员军事力量。如果是这样，他们几乎永远不会战斗。只有在最有利或最绝望的情况下，理性的人才会愿意根据短期成本效益分析参与一场可能致命的战斗。也许经济人可能会在阳光明媚的日子战斗，那时他一方的力量势不可挡，敌人虚弱，战斗的潜在回报诱人。也许。如果被掠夺成性的食人族逼入绝境，他也可能战斗。

This has important implications. The more effective sovereignties are in limiting defections and encouraging military effort, the more likely they are to prevail militarily. In warfare, the most useful value systems induce people to behave in ways that short-term rational calculation would rule out. No organization could mobilize military power effectively if the individuals it sent into battle felt free to calculate where their own best advantage lay, and join in the fight or run away accordingly. If so, they would almost never fight. Only under the most propitious circumstances, or the most desperate, would the rational person care to engage in a potentially lethal battle based upon short-term cost-benefit analysts. Perhaps Homo economicus might fight on a sunny day, when the forces on his side were overwhelming, the enemy weak, and the potential rewards of battle enticing. Perhaps. He might also fight if backed into a corner by marauding cannibals.

但这些都是极端情况。更常见的战争条件又如何呢？这些条件既没有吸引力，无法通过成本效益分析的审查，也没有绝望到无路可走。正是在这里，骑士精神和公民意识等概念是成功使用军事力量的重要因素。早在战争开始之前，占主导地位的组织就必须说服个人，履行对领主或民族国家的某些义务比生命本身更重要。社会用来鼓励在战场上冒险的神话和合理化是其军事实力的重要组成部分。

But those are extreme circumstances. What of the more common conditions of warfare, which are neither so attractive that they would pass the scrutiny of cost-benefit analysis nor so desperate that they afford no way out? It is here that concepts like chivalry and citizenship are important contributors to the successful use of military power. Long before a battle begins, predominant organizations must convince individuals that upholding certain duties to the lord, or the nation-state, are more important than life itself. The myths and rationalizations that societies employ to encourage risk-taking on the battlefield are a key part of their military prowess.

为了发挥作用，这些神话必须适应当前的大政治条件。骑士统治世界的虚构在今天毫无意义，尤其是在纽约这样的城市。但它是封建主义的珍贵神话。它为将每个人都束缚在教会和好战贵族统治下的义务纽带辩护和合理化。在贪婪的私人战争司空见惯的时代，¹²权力的行使和个人的生存取决于其他人是否愿意在胁迫条件下履行服兵役的承诺。显然，这些承诺必须可靠。

To be effective, these myths must be tailored to the prevailing megapolitical conditions. The fiction that chivalry rules the world means nothing today, especially in a city like New York. But it was the cherished myth of feudalism. It justified and rationalized the ties of obligation that bound everyone under the domination of the Church and a warlike nobility. At a time when private wars of covetousness were commonplace,¹² the exercise of power and the very survival of individuals depended upon the willingness of others to fulfill their promises of military service under conditions of duress. It was obviously crucial that those promises be dependable.

国籍之前

Before Nationality

与今天不同，民族概念在中世纪的主权确立中几乎没有发挥任何作用。君主以及一些教会王子和有权势的领主都以私人权利拥有领土。这些领主可以出售或赠予领土，也可以通过转让、婚姻以及征服获得新领土，而现代人无法做到这一点。今天，你很难想象美国会因为一位不说英语的葡萄牙总统与前美国总统的女儿结婚而落入他的统治之下。然而，类似的事情在中世纪的欧洲却很常见。权力通过世袭传承。城市和国家更换君主的方式就像古董更换主人一样。在许多情况下，君主并不是其财产所在地区的本地人。有时他们不会说当地语言，或者说得很糟糕，口音很重。但无论是西班牙人是雅典国王，还是奥地利人是西班牙国王，对个人义务的约束几乎没有影响。

Unlike today, the concept of nationality played little or no role in establishing sovereignty in the Middle Ages. Monarchs, as well as some princes of the Church and powerful lords, possessed territories by private right. In a way that has no modern analogy, these lords could sell or give away territories or acquire new ones by conveyance or marriage as well as by conquest. Today, you could hardly imagine the United States falling under the sovereignty of a non-English-speaking Portuguese president because he happened to marry the former American president’s daughter. Yet something similar was commonplace in medieval Europe. Power passed by hereditary descent. Cities and countries changed sovereigns the way that antiques change owners. In many cases, sovereigns were not native to the regions in which their properties lay. Sometimes they did not speak the local language, or spoke it badly with heavy accents. But it made little difference to the ties of personal obligation whether a Spaniard was king of Athens, or an Austrian was king of Spain.

企业主权

Corporate Sovereignty

圣殿骑士团、圣约翰骑士团、条顿骑士团和马耳他骑士团等宗教团体也行使主权。尽管马耳他骑士团仍然存在，而且正如我们撰写本文时一样，他们正准备收回马耳他圣安杰洛堡的主权，但这种混合机构在现代尚无对应机构。他们将宗教、社会、司法和金融活动与地方主权结合起来。13^虽然他们行使领土管辖权，但他们几乎与当今的政府相反，因为国籍在动员他们的支持或治理方案中没有发挥任何作用。这些宗教团体的成员和官员来自基督教欧洲各地，即众所周知的“基督教世界”。

Sovereignty was also exercised by religious corporations like the Knights Templar, the Knights of St. John, the Teutonic Knights, and the Knights of Malta. While the Knights of Malta still exist and as we write are poised to recover sovereignty over Fort St. Angelo in Malta, such hybrid institutions have had no modern counterparts. They combined religious, social, judicial, and financial activities with sovereignty over localities.¹³ While they exercised territorial jurisdiction, they were almost the opposite of today’s governments in that nationality played no role in the mobilization of their support or their scheme of governance. The members and officers of these religious orders were drawn from all parts of Christian Europe, or “Christendom,” as it was known.

没有人认为从当地民众中选拔统治者是恰当或必要的。在中世纪支离破碎的治理体制中，动员支持并不像现代那样取决于国家认同或对国家的责任，而是取决于个人忠诚和必须作为个人荣誉而维护的习惯关系。任何地方的任何人都可以宣誓遵守这些职责，只要他的地位被认为值得遵守。

No one thought it appropriate or necessary that those who ruled be drawn from the local populations. The mobilization of support in the fragmented medieval scheme of governance did not depend upon a national identity or duty to the state, as in modern times, but upon personal loyalty and customary ties that had to be upheld as a matter of personal honor. Oaths to uphold these duties could be sworn by anyone from anywhere provided he was otherwise deemed worthy by his station in life.

誓言

The Vow

骑士誓言将个人彼此联系起来，并以誓言参与者的荣誉宣誓。正如赫伊津哈所写，“在立誓时，人们会给自己施加一些苦难，以激励自己完成承诺要做的事情。” ¹⁴人们非常重视遵守誓言，以至于人们经常冒着死亡或遭受严重苦难的风险，以避免违背誓言。通常，誓言本身会约束个人为了荣誉而做出一些行为，而这些行为在你和本书的大多数读者看来可能很荒谬。

Chivalric vows bound individuals to one another and were sworn on the honor of those who were parties to them. As Huizinga wrote, “in making a vow, people imposed some privation upon themselves as a spur to accomplishment of the actions they were pledged to perform.”¹⁴ So much importance was placed upon honoring vows that people frequently risked death or suffered serious privations in order to avoid breaking their vows. Often, the oaths themselves bound individuals to perform as matters of honor acts that would probably seem ludicrous to you and most readers of this book.

例如，星骑士发誓绝不撤退“超过四英亩的战场，但不久之后，他们中有九十多人因此丧生。” ¹⁵禁止战术撤退作为军事战略是不合理的。但这是骑士誓言的共同要求。在阿金库尔战役之前，英国国王下令巡逻的骑士必须脱下盔甲，理由是如果他们穿着外衣盔甲，从敌方阵线撤退会违背他们的荣誉。碰巧国王自己迷路了，路过他军队先锋部队夜间驻扎的村庄。由于他穿着盔甲，他的骑士荣誉不允许他在发现错误后掉头返回村庄。他在一个暴露的位置度过了一夜。

For example, the Knights of the Star swore an oath never to retire “more than four acres from the battlefield, through which rule soon afterwards more than ninety of them lost their lives.”¹⁵ The prohibition on even tactical retreat is irrational as a military strategy. But it was a common imperative of the chivalric vows. Before the Battle of Agincourt, the king of England issued an order that knights on patrol should remove their armor, on grounds that it would have been incompatible with their honor to withdraw from enemy lines if they were wearing their coat armor. It so happened that the king himself got lost and passed by the village that had been night quarters for the vanguard of his army. Since he was wearing armor, his chivalric honor forbade him to simply turn around when he discovered his mistake and return to the village. He spent the night in an exposed position.

虽然这个例子看起来很愚蠢，但亨利国王可能并没有失算，他认为撤退会侵犯他的荣誉，从而为他的整个军队树立一个士气低落的榜样，而不是睡在敌后，这样他冒的风险更大。

As silly as this example seems, King Henry probably did not miscalculate in thinking that he would have risked more in trespassing his honor by retreating, and thus setting a demoralizing example for his entire army, than he did by sleeping behind enemy lines.

中世纪的历史充满了杰出人物履行在我们看来荒谬的誓言的例子。在许多情况下，所提议的行动与任何利益没有任何客观联系，只是生动地展示了那些承诺者对誓言本身的重视。常见的誓言包括：闭上一只眼睛，只在站着时吃喝，加入单人锁链队，成为一个自我强加的残疾人。当时，戴着痛苦的脚镣是一种普遍的习俗。如果今天你看到有人戴着沉重的脚镣在街上挣扎，你可能会认为他疯了，而不是一个有道德的人。然而，在骑士精神的背景下，自愿戴上这样的装置是一种荣誉。还有许多类似的习俗，在今天看来同样荒谬可笑。正如赫伊津哈所描述的那样，许多人发誓“星期六不睡在床上，星期五不吃动物食物，等等。一个苦行行为叠加在另一个苦行行为之上：一个贵族承诺不穿盔甲，每周有一天不喝酒，不睡在床上，不坐下来吃饭，穿粗毛衬衣”，¹⁶

The history of the Middle Ages is filled with examples of prominent people fulfilling pledges that would seem ridiculous to us. In many cases, the actions proposed involved no objective connection to any benefit other than a vivid demonstration of the importance those undertaking them placed upon the vow itself. Among the common vows: to keep one eye closed, to eat and drink only when standing, and to become a self-imposed cripple by entering a one-person chain gang. There was a widespread custom of wearing painful foot irons. If today you saw someone struggling along the street in a heavy leg iron, you would probably assume that he was insane, not that he was a man of great virtue. Yet in the context of chivalry, willingly donning such a device was a badge of honor. And there were many similar customs that would seem equally ludicrous today. As Huizinga describes it, many took a pledge “not to sleep in a bed on Saturday, not to take animal food on Friday, etc. One act of asceticism is heaped upon another: one nobleman promises to wear no armor, to drink no wine one day in every week, not to sleep in a bed, not to sit down to meals, to wear the hair shirt,”¹⁶

四旬斋作为这种自我强加的不适感的温和得多的版本而存在。

Lent survives as a much moderated version of this self-imposed discomfort.

许多热衷于宣誓的人成立了修会，对其成员施加特别艰难的禁食，以考验他们的荣誉。例如，伽罗瓦和伽罗瓦修会夏天穿“毛皮和毛皮衬里的兜帽，在壁炉里生火，而冬天他们只被允许穿一件没有毛皮的简单外套；既不穿斗篷，也不戴帽子，也不戴手套，只穿非常轻便的睡衣。”正如胡伊津哈所报道的那样，“许多成员死于寒冷并不奇怪。” ¹⁷。

Many enthusiasts for vows formed orders that placed particularly difficult privations on their members as tests of honor. The Order of Galois and Galoises, for example, dressed during summers in “furs and fur-lined hoods and lighted a fire in the hearth, whereas in winter they were only allowed to wear a simple coat without fur; neither mantles, not hats, nor gloves, and had only very light bed clothes.” As Huizinga reports, “It is not surprising that a great many members died of cold.”¹⁷.

“中世纪的自我鞭笞是一种残酷的折磨，人们通过这种折磨自己，希望上帝能够放下他的权杖，宽恕他们的罪孽，让他们免受今生和来世本应遭受的更严重的惩罚。” ¹⁸

—诺曼·康

“Medieval self-flagellation was a grim torture which people inflicted on themselves in the hope of inducing a judging and punishing God to put away his rod, to forgive their sins, to spare them the greater chastisements which would otherwise be theirs in this life and the next.”¹⁸

—NORMAN COHN

鞭笞，过去和现在

Flagellation, Then and Now

这与带来危险和贫困的誓言相差无几，它意味着磨难、朝圣、屈辱、不适，甚至故意自残。在中世纪，这些行为被视为非常有益和值得称赞的。它们表明了誓言的严肃性，这种逻辑在今天的兄弟会或姐妹会入会仪式中也并非完全陌生。

It was a short step from the vow that imposed danger and privation to ordeals, pilgrimages, mortification, discomfort, and even purposefully self-inflicted injury. These could be seen as highly beneficial and praiseworthy in the medieval period. They were gestures of the seriousness with which vows were held, a logic that is not entirely foreign even today to fraternity or sorority initiations.

夏天闷热、冬天寒冷或赤脚在雪地里朝圣，与“严酷的折磨”——自我鞭笞相比，都相对温和。这是一种中世纪特有的忏悔形式，几乎与封建制度的开始同时出现。它最早“在十一世纪初被卡马尔多利和丰特阿韦拉纳修道院的隐士们采用” ^。19

Stifling in summer, freezing in winter, or walking in barefoot pilgrimages in the snow was relatively tame compared to “the grim torture” of self-flagellation. This was a particularly medieval form of penance that came into being almost exactly at the same time feudalism, began. It was first “adopted by hermits in the monastic communities of Camaldoli and Fonte Avellana early in the eleventh century.”¹⁹

鞭笞者们不仅在寒冷的天气里赤脚行走，他们还组织游行，日夜兼程，从一个城镇行进到另一个城镇。“他们每到一处城镇，就会在教堂前排成一队，连续鞭笞自己几个小时。” ²⁰

Rather than just walking barefoot in cold weather, flagellants organized processions in which they would march day and night, from one town to the next. “And each time they came to a town they would arrange themselves in groups before the church and flog themselves for hours on end.”²⁰

我们相信，未来的人们回顾民族国家时代，会发现二十世纪以公民身份所做的某些事情，就像我们认为的自我鞭策一样荒唐可笑。从信息社会的角度来看，现代士兵为了对民族国家的忠诚而走遍半个地球以死取乐的场面，将被视为荒唐可笑。这似乎与一些非同寻常的、夸张的骑士仪式没有太大区别，比如戴着脚镣走路，而封建时期理智的人却以此为荣。

We believe that people in the future who look back at the era of the nation-state will find some of the undertakings done in the twentieth century in the name of citizenship as ludicrous as we consider self-flagellation. From the vantage point of the Information Society, the spectacle of soldiers in the modern period traveling halfway around the world to entertain death out of loyalty to the nation-state will come to be seen as grotesque and silly. It will seem not far different from some of the extraordinary and exaggerated rites of chivalry, like walking about in leg irons, which otherwise sensible people took pride in doing during the feudal period.

骑士精神让位于公民精神

Chivalry Yields to Citizenship

当大政治环境发生变化，对领主宣誓的军事目的过时，骑士精神逐渐消失，取而代之的是公民身份。火药武器和工业军队的世界涉及战斗人员和士兵之间非常不同的关系。他们的指挥官。公民权的出现是因为暴力的回报很高，并且还在不断上升，而国家拥有的资源比中世纪发动战争的社会实体多得多。由于拥有强大的权力和财富，民族国家可以直接与穿着制服作战的大量普通士兵达成交易。

Chivalry faded away, to be replaced by citizenship, when megapolitical conditions changed and the military purpose of the vow to one’s lord was antiquated. The world of gunpowder weapons and industrial armies involved very different relations between the individuals who did the fighting and their commanders. Citizenship emerged when returns to violence were high and rising, and the state had vastly greater resources than the social entities that waged war in the medieval period. Because of its great power and wealth, the nation-state could strike a bargain directly with the mass of common soldiers who fought in its uniform.

事实证明，这样的交易对国家来说要便宜得多，而且比通过与强大的领主和地方知名人士谈判来集结军事力量要少得多，因为每个领主和地方知名人士都能够抵制违背其利益的要求，而民族国家中的任何一个公民都无法做到这一点。

Such bargains proved to be far cheaper to the state and much less troublesome than attempts to assemble military forces by negotiating with powerful lords and local notables, each of whom was capable of resisting demands that ran counter to his interests as no individual citizen in the nation-state conceivably could.

出于我们稍后会深入探讨的原因，公民身份的关键取决于这样一个事实：没有任何个人或一小群人能够在超级政治中独立行使军事力量。随着信息技术改变战争逻辑，它将取代公民身份的神话，就像火药取代中世纪骑士精神一样。

For reasons we explore at greater depth later, citizenship crucially depended upon the fact that no individual or small group of individuals was megapolitically capable of exercising military power independently. As information technology alters the logic of battle, it will antiquate the myths of citizenship just as assuredly as gunpowder antiquated medieval chivalry.

马背上的地狱天使

Hell’s Angels on Horseback

统治西欧几个世纪的骑兵贵族与他们的后代相比，简直就是绅士。他们粗鲁而暴力。用今天的话来说，他们更应该被理解为中世纪的摩托帮。礼仪规则和骑士精神的伪装更多的是缓和他们的暴行，而不是描述他们真正的行为方式。即使是百科全书式的骑士规则和义务的描述，也几乎无法揭示贵族权力的基础。

The aristocracy of mounted warriors that dominated Western Europe for centuries were hardly the gentlemen their descendants became. They were rough and violent. In today’s terms they could be better understood as the medieval equivalent of motorcycle gangs. The rules of manners and pretenses of chivalry served more to temper their excesses than as a description of the way they really behaved. Even an encyclopedic account of the rules and obligations of chivalry would have revealed little or nothing about the foundations of the nobility’s power.

完美是疲惫的同义词

Perfection as a Synonym for Exhaustion

15 世纪末，有效的火药武器的出现，在他们脚下引爆了强大的爆炸力——就像武装骑士前所未有地完善了他们的艺术一样。到那时，精心培育终于培育出一匹身高 16 掌的战马，这种战马的体型足以让全副武装的骑士轻松驮着它。然而，正如 C. 诺斯科特·帕金森敏锐地指出的那样，“完美”只有濒临崩溃的制度才能实现。21^就在新战马完善的同时，新武器被部署来将战马和骑士从战场上击退。这些新的火药武器可以由平民发射。使用它们几乎不需要技巧，但大量采购成本高昂。它们的普及稳步提高了商业相对于农业的重要性，而农业曾是封建经济的基础。

The advent of effective gunpowder weapons at the end of the fifteenth century detonated a powerful blast under their feet—just as armed knights had perfected their art as never before. By then, careful breeding had finally produced a battle horse sixteen hands high, a steed with the stature to carry comfortably a mounted knight in full armor. Yet “perfection,” as C. Northcote Parkinson shrewdly noted, “is achieved only by institutions on the point of collapse.”²¹ Just as the new warhorse was perfected, new weapons were deployed to blast horse and knight from the battlefield. These new gunpowder weapons could be fired by commoners. They required little skill to use but were expensive to procure in quantity. Their proliferation steadily increased the importance of commerce as compared to agriculture, which had been the foundation of the feudal economy.

更大规模的战争

War at a Higher Scale

火药武器是如何促成这种转变的？首先，它们扩大了战争规模，这意味着发动战争的成本很快远高于中世纪时期。在火药革命之前，战争通常由规模很小的团体发动，因此可以在一小片贫瘠的领土上发动。火药为大规模战争带来了新的优势。只有拥有富裕臣民的统治者才能在新的条件下部署有效的军队。那些最能适应商业发展的领导人，通常是与城市商人结盟的君主，发现他们在战场上享有竞争优势。用范克里维尔德的话来说，“部分得益于他们掌握的优势财政资源，他们可以购买比其他任何人都多的大炮，把对手炸成碎片。” ²²

How did gunpowder weapons precipitate such a transformation? For one thing, they raised the scale of fighting, which meant that waging war soon became far more costly than it had been during the medieval period. Before the Gunpowder Revolution, wars had normally been fought by groups so small that they could be levied over a small and poor territory. Gunpowder gave a new advantage to fighting on a larger scale. Only leaders with claims on rich subjects could afford to field effective forces under the new conditions. Those leaders who best accommodated the growth of commerce, usually monarchs who allied themselves with the urban merchants, found that they enjoyed a competitive advantage on the battlefield. In van Creveld’s words, “thanks in part to the superior financial resources at their disposal, they could purchase more cannon than anybody else and blast the opposition to pieces.”²²

尽管火药武器的完整逻辑要经过几个世纪才能在法国大革命的公民军队中得到充分运用，但文艺复兴时期军装的采用是火药改变战争的一个早期迹象。军装恰如其分地象征着战士与民族国家之间的新关系，这种新关系与从骑士精神到公民精神的转变相辅相成。实际上，新的民族国家将与其公民达成“统一”的交易，而不像封建制度下的君主或教皇与一长串封臣达成的特殊、不同的交易。在旧制度中，每个人在建筑等级制度中都有不同的位置。每个人都有一份独一无二的交易，就像他的徽章和他挥舞的彩色三角旗一样。

Even though it would be centuries before the full logic of gunpowder weapons would be unleashed in the citizen armies of the French Revolution, an early hint of the transformation of warfare by gunpowder was the adoption of military uniforms in the Renaissance. The uniforms aptly symbolize the new relations between the warrior and the nation-state that went hand in hand with the transition from chivalry to citizenship. In effect, the new nation-state would strike a “uniform” bargain with its citizens, unlike the special, divergent bargains struck by the monarch or the pope with a long chain of vassals under feudalism. In the old system, everyone had a different place in an architectonic hierarchy. Everyone had a bargain as unique as his coat of arms and the colorful pennants he flew.

降低致富的机会成本

Lowering the Opportunity Costs of Riches

火药武器从另一个方面彻底改变了社会的性质。它们将权力的行使与体力分离，从而降低了商业活动的机会成本。富商不再需要依靠自己的技巧和力量进行肉搏战，也不再需要依靠忠诚度不明的雇佣兵来保护自己。他们可以指望大君主新的、更庞大的军队来保护自己。正如威廉·普莱费尔 (William Playfair) 谈到中世纪时所说：“虽然人力是人们在敌对情况下恼怒的力量…… 当时不可能长期兼具财富和权力。” ²³当火药出现时，不富有就不可能拥有权力。

Gunpowder weapons radically altered the nature of society in yet another way. They separated the exercise of power from physical strength, thereby lowering the opportunity costs of mercantile activity. Rich merchants no longer had to depend upon their own finesse and strength in hand-to-hand combat or on mercenaries of uncertain loyalty to defend themselves. They could hope to be defended by the new, larger armies of the great monarchs. As William Playfair said of the Middle Ages, “While human force was the power by which men were annoyed, in cases of hostility,… [t]o be wealthy and powerful long together was then impossible.”²³ When gunpowder came along, it was impossible to be powerful without being rich.

状态和静态理解

Status and Static Understanding

出于许多相同的原因，如今大多数人都无法预测信息社会的新动态，中世纪社会的主要思想家无法预测或理解商业的兴起，而商业在塑造现代时期中发挥了如此重要的作用。五个世纪前，大多数人都以静态的方式看待他们不断变化的社会。正如赫伊津哈所说：“从现代意义上讲，很少有财产是流动的，而权力还没有主要与金钱联系在一起；它仍然是人固有的，取决于他所激发的一种宗教敬畏；它通过浮华和宏伟，或一大群忠实的追随者来体现。封建或等级思想通过可见的标志来表达宏伟的理念……” ²⁴因为中世纪晚期的人们首先考虑的是地位，所以他们没有准备好理解商人可能对王国的生活做出任何重要的贡献。几乎毫无例外，商人都是平民。他们处于三个等级的最底层，低于贵族和僧侣。

For many of the same reasons that most people today are ill-prepared to anticipate the new dynamics of the Information Society, the leading thinkers of medieval society were unable to anticipate or understand the rise of commerce that played so important a part in shaping the modern period. Most people five centuries ago viewed their changing society in static terms. As Huizinga said, “Very little property is, in the modern sense, liquid, while power is not yet associated predominantly with money; it is still rather inherent in the person and depends on a sort of religious awe which he inspires; it makes itself felt by pomp and magnificence, or a numerous train of faithful followers. Feudal or hierarchic thought expresses the idea of grandeur by visible signs.…”²⁴ Because people in the late Middle Ages thought before all else of status, they were ill-prepared to comprehend that merchants could possibly contribute anything of importance to the life of the realm. Almost without exception, merchants were commoners. They fit at the bottom of the three estates, below the nobility and the clergy.

即使是中世纪晚期社会中那些更敏锐的思想家，也未能认识到商业和农业以外的其他形式的企业对于积累财富的重要性。对他们来说，贫穷是一种使徒般的美德。他们实际上没有区分富有的银行家和乞丐。用赫伊津哈的话来说，“在第三等级，富人和穷人之间，城镇居民和乡下人之间，原则上没有区别。” ²⁵在他们的计划中，职业和财富都不重要，只有骑士身份。

Even the more perceptive thinkers of late-medieval society failed to appreciate the importance of commerce and other forms of enterprise outside of farming for accumulating wealth. To them, poverty was an apostolic virtue. They literally made no distinction between a wealthy banker and a beggar. In Huizinga’s words, “No distinction in principle was made in the third estate, between rich and poor citizens, nor between townsmen and country-people.”²⁵ Neither occupation nor wealth mattered in their scheme, merely chivalric status.

这种对生活经济层面的盲目性得到了教士的强化，他们是中世纪生活的意识形态守护者。他们远未理解商业的重要性，以至于一项广受赞誉的 15 世纪改革计划提议要求所有非贵族身份的人都专门从事手工艺或农业劳动。根本没有考虑商业的作用^。26

This blindness to the economic dimension of life was reinforced by churchmen, who were the ideological guardians of medieval life. They were so far from grasping the importance of commerce that one widely applauded fifteenth-century reform program proposed that all persons of nonnoble status be required to devote themselves exclusively to handicrafts or farm labor. No role was contemplated for commerce whatsoever.²⁶

“1492 年这个日期通常用来区分中世纪和现代历史，它和其他任何分界点一样，从世界历史的角度来看，哥伦布的航行象征着西欧与世界其他地区之间新关系的开始。” ²⁷

—弗雷德里克·C·莱恩

“The date 1492, conventionally used to separate medieval from modern history, serves as well as any other dividing point, for in the perspective of world history, Columbus’s voyage symbolizes the beginning of a new relationship between Western Europe and the rest of the world.”²⁷

—FREDERIC C. LANE

工业时代的诞生​​​​

THE BIRTH OF THE INDUSTRIAL AGE

15 世纪许多最敏锐的思想家完全忽视了历史上一个更重要的发展，而这一发展正是在他们眼皮底下开始的。封建制度的衰落标志着西方主导地位的伟大现代阶段的开始。这是一个暴力行为不断增加、企业规模不断扩大的时期。在过去的两个半世纪里，现代经济为世界上享受到最大利益的那部分人带来了前所未有的生活水平提高。这些变化的催化剂是新技术，从火药武器到印刷机，这些技术以很少有人能理解的方式改变了生活的界限。

Many of the keenest minds of the fifteenth century totally missed one of the more important developments in history, one that began under their eyes. The eclipse of feudalism marked the onset of the great modern phase of Western predominance. It was a period of rising returns to violence and rising scale in enterprise. For the past two and a half centuries, the modern economy has delivered an unparalleled rise in living standards for that fraction of the world that enjoyed its greatest benefits. The catalysts for these changes were new technologies, from gunpowder weapons to the printing press, which changed the boundaries of life in ways that few could grasp.

到了 15 世纪的最后十年，像哥伦布这样的探险家才刚刚开始探索广阔的未知大陆。自人类存在以来，这是他们第一次探索整个世界。帆船，即地中海帆船上新式的高桅帆船，环游世界，绘制出后来成为贸易路线和疾病和征服通道的航道。征服者在海上和岸上挥舞着他们的新青铜大炮，开辟了新的视野。他们发现了黄金和香料的财富，种植了从烟草到土豆等新的经济作物的种子，并为他们的牛群开辟了新的牧场。

By the final decade of the fifteenth century, explorers like Columbus were just beginning to open an approach to vast, unknown continents. For the first time in the immemorial ages of human existence, the whole world was compassed. Galleons, new high-masted improvisations on Mediterranean galleys, circumnavigated the globe, charting the passages that were to become trade routes and thoroughfares for disease and conquest. Conquistadors wielding their new bronze cannon on sea and on shore blasted open new horizons. They found fortunes in gold and spices, planted the seeds of new cash crops, from tobacco to potatoes, and staked out new grazing lands for their cattle.

第一产业技术

The First Industrial Technology

就像大炮打开了新的经济视野一样，印刷机也打开了新的知识视野。它是第一台大规模生产的机器，是标志着工业化开始的标志性技术。这样说，我们同意亚当·斯密在《国富论》中提出的观点，即工业革命在他写作之前就已经发生了。当然，它还没有成熟，但大规模生产和工厂系统的原则已经确立。他著名的别针制造商的例子就说明了这一点。斯密解释了如何采用十八种独立的操作来生产别针。由于专业技术和劳动分工，每个员工每天可以制造的别针数量是个人单独制造的 4,800 倍^。28

Just as the cannon was opening new economic horizons, the printing press opened new intellectual horizons. It was the first machine of mass production, a signature technology that marked the onset of industrialism. In saying this, we share the view advanced by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations that the Industrial Revolution had already happened well before he wrote. It had not reached maturity, to be sure, but the principles of mass production and the factory system were well established. His famous example of the pin manufacturers makes this case. Smith explains how eighteen separate operations are employed to produce pins. Because of specialized technology and the division of labor, each employee could make 4,800 times more pins in a day than an individual could fabricate on his own.²⁸

史密斯的例子强调了这样一个事实：工业革命的开始时间比历史学家通常认为的要早几个世纪。大多数教科书将其起源追溯到 18 世纪中叶。作为生活水平提高的起飞阶段，这个日期并非不合理。但封建主义和工业主义之间的实际大政治转型开始得更早，在 15 世纪末。其其影响几乎立即体现在主导机构的转变中，特别是中世纪教会的衰落。

Smith’s example underscores the fact that the Industrial Revolution began centuries earlier than historians conventionally assume. Most textbooks would date its origins to the middle of the eighteenth century. That is not unreasonable as a date for the takeoff stage in the improvement of living standards. But the actual megapolitical transition between feudalism and industrialism began much earlier, at the end of the fifteenth century. Its impact was felt almost immediately in the transformation of dominant institutions, particularly in the eclipse of the medieval Church.

那些将工业革命置于更晚时期的历史学家，他们衡量的其实是其他东西，即由发动机驱动的大规模生产所带来的生活水平的提高。这提高了非熟练劳动力的价值，并导致各种消费品的价格下跌。事实上，不同国家的生活水平在不同时期开始大幅上升，这一事实表明，他们衡量的不是大政治转型。《剑桥欧洲经济史》以复数形式提到“工业革命”，明确将其与国民收入的持续增长联系起来。29^在日本和俄罗斯，这种收入激增被推迟到 19 世纪末。亚洲其他地区和非洲部分地区的生活水平提高和国民收入的持续增长是 20 世纪的现象。在非洲部分地区，持续增长至今仍是一个梦想。但这并不意味着这些地区没有生活在现代。

The historians who place the Industrial Revolution later are really measuring something else, the takeoff of living standards attributable to mass production powered by engines. This raised the value of unskilled labor and led to falling prices for a wide variety of consumer goods. Indeed, the fact that living standards began to rise sharply at different times in different countries is a tip-off that something other than the megapolitical transition is being measured. The Cambridge Economic History of Europe speaks of “Industrial Revolutions” in the plural, explicitly linking them to the sustained growth of national incomes.²⁹ In Japan and Russia, this income surge was delayed until the end of the nineteenth century. The rise in living standards and sustained growth of national income in other parts of Asia and some parts of Africa was a twentieth-century phenomenon. In some parts of Africa, sustained growth remains a dream to this day. But that does not mean that these regions are not living in the modern age.

转型期收入下降

Falling Income in Transition

收入增长并不等同于工业化的到来。向工业社会的转变是一个政治大事件，无法直接用收入统计来衡量。事实上，大多数欧洲人的实际收入在工业时代的前两个世纪里都在下降。直到 18 世纪初，他们的收入才开始上升，直到 1750 年左右才恢复到 1250 年的水平。我们认为工业时代的开始是在 15 世纪末。正是早期现代技术的工业特征，包括化学武器和印刷机，促成了封建制度的崩溃。

The growth of income is not synonymous with the advent of industrialism. The shift to an industrial society was a megapolitical event, not measurable directly in income statistics. Indeed, real incomes for most Europeans fell for the first two centuries of the Industrial Age. They only began rising sometime after the beginning of the eighteenth century, and they did not recover to levels of 1250 until about 1750. We place the launch of the Industrial Age at the end of the fifteenth century. It was the industrial features of early-modern technology, including chemically powered weapons and printing presses, that precipitated the collapse of feudalism.

降低知识成本

Lowering the Cost of Knowledge

大规模生产书籍的能力对中世纪的制度具有极大的颠覆性，就像微技术对现代民族国家具有颠覆性一样。印刷术迅速破坏了教会对上帝话语的垄断，同时也为异端邪说创造了一个新的市场。对封闭封建社会不利的思想迅速传播，到 15 世纪最后十年，出版了 1000 万本书。由于教会试图压制印刷机，大多数新书都是在欧洲权威最薄弱的地区出版的。这可能与当今美国政府试图压制加密技术非常相似。教会发现审查制度并没有抑制颠覆性技术的传播；它仅仅确保这些技术被用于最具颠覆性的用途。

The capacity to mass-produce books was incredibly subversive to medieval institutions, just as microtechnology will prove subversive to the modern nation-state. Printing rapidly undermined the Church’s monopoly on the word of God, even as it created a new market for heresy. Ideas inimical to the closed feudal society spread rapidly, as 10 million books were published by the final decade of the fifteenth century. Because the Church attempted to suppress the printing press, most of the new volumes were published in those areas of Europe where the writ of established authority was the weakest. This may prove to be a close analogy with attempts by the U.S. government today to suppress encryption technology. The Church found that censorship did not suppress the spread of subversive technology; it merely assured that it was put to its most subversive use.

贬低修道院

Depreciating the Monasteries

印刷机的许多看似无害的用途因其内容而具有颠覆性。仅仅是传播勇敢的冒险家和商人赚取财富的知识本身就是一种强大的溶剂，可以溶解封建义务的束缚。新市场的诱惑，以及大规模资助陆军和海军的需求和机会，使货币具有了封建时代所缺乏的价值。这些新的投资渠道，加上强大的武器，提高了暴力的回报，使得内陆地区的领主或城市的商人将资本捐赠给教会的成本越来越高。因此，土地所有权之外的投资机会的创造本身就破坏了封建制度的稳定并削弱了其意识形态。

Many apparently innocent uses of the printing press were subversive because of their content. Merely the spread of knowledge of the fortunes to be earned by intrepid adventurers and merchants was itself a powerful solvent dissolving the bonds of feudal obligation. The temptation of new markets, along with the need and opportunity to fund armies and navies on a larger scale, gave money a value it had lacked in the feudal centuries. These new avenues for investment, reinforced by powerful weapons that raised the returns to violence, made it increasingly costly to the lord in the hinterlands or the merchant in the city to donate his capital to the Church. Thus the very creation of investment opportunities outside of landholdings destabilized the institutions of feudalism and undercut its ideology.

印刷机的另一个颠覆性后果是它大大降低了复制信息的成本。中世纪识字率和经济发展如此低迷的一个关键原因是手工复制手稿的成本太高。正如我们所见，罗马沦陷后，教会承担的主要生产职能之一是在本笃会修道院复制书籍和手稿。这是一项极其昂贵的工作。印刷术的一个更显著的后果是贬低了抄写室的价值，僧侣们日复一日、月复一月地在那里劳作，制作可以用印刷机在几个小时内复制的手稿。新技术使本笃会抄写室成为一种过时且昂贵的复制知识的手段。这反过来又使支持抄写员的宗教团体和教会在经济上变得不那么重要了。

Another subversive consequence of the printing press was its effect in dramatically lowering the costs of reproducing information. A crucial reason why literacy and economic progress had been so minimal during the Middle Ages was the high cost of duplicating manuscripts by hand. As we have seen, one of the major productive functions assumed by the Church after the fall of Rome was reproducing books and manuscripts in Benedictine monasteries. This was an extremely costly undertaking. One of the more dramatic consequences of printing was to devalue the scriptoria, where monks labored day after day, month after month to produce manuscripts that could be duplicated in hours by printing presses. The new technology made the Benedictine scriptorium an obsolete and costly means of reproducing knowledge. This, in turn, made the religious orders and the Church that sustained the scribes less economically important.

书籍的大规模生产结束了教会对圣经以及其他形式信息的垄断。书籍的普及降低了识字成本，从而增加了能够就重要主题（尤其是神学主题）发表自己意见的思想家的数量。正如神学历史学家尤安·卡梅伦所说，十六世纪前二十年“一系列出版里程碑”为“现代文本批评对圣经的应用奠定了基础”。30^这“通过质疑用于支持传统教条的文本的腐败解读”威胁了教会的“垄断地位”。31 这种^新知识鼓励了竞争性新教教派的出现，他们试图形成自己对圣经的解释。书籍的大规模生产降低了异端的成本，并为异端者提供了大量读者。

Mass production of books ended the Church’s monopoly on Scripture, as well as on other forms of information. The wider availability of books reduced the cost of literacy and thus multiplied the number of thinkers who were in a position to offer their own opinions on important subjects, particularly theological subjects. As theological historian Euan Cameron put it, “[a] series of publishing milestones” in the first two decades of the sixteenth century set the groundwork for the application of “modern text criticism to Scriptures.”³⁰ This “threatened the monopoly” of the Church “by questioning corrupt readings of texts which had been used to support traditional dogmas.”³¹ This new knowledge encouraged the emergence of competitive Protestant sects who sought to formulate their own interpretations of the Bible. Mass production of books lowered the cost of heresy and gave the heretics large audiences of readers.

出版也摧毁了中世纪的世界观。信息越来越容易获得，成本越来越低，人们的世界观也不再是靠象征意义而不是因果关系联系在一起的。“象征主义的世界形象以无可挑剔的秩序、建筑结构和等级从属为特征。因为每个象征性联系都意味着等级或神圣性的差异……核桃象征着基督；甜甜的果仁是祂的神性，绿色多汁的外皮是祂的人性，中间的木质外壳是十字架。因此，所有事物都将思想提升到永恒……” ³²

Publishing also helped destroy the medieval worldview. The greater availability and lower costs for information led to shifts away from a view of the world linked by symbolism rather than causal connections. “Symbolism’s image of the world is distinguished by impeccable order, architectonic structure, hierarchic subordination. For each symbolic connexion implies a difference of rank or sanctity.… The walnut signifies Christ; the sweet kernel is His divine nature, the green and pulpy outer peel is His humanity, the wooden shell between is the cross. Thus all things raise the thoughts to the eternal.…”³²

符号思维模式不仅与社会的等级结构相辅相成，也适合文盲。木刻版画中符号传达的思想对文盲人群来说很容易理解。相比之下，现代印刷术的出现，让识字人群能够运用科学方法建立因果关系。

A symbolic mode of thinking not only complemented a hierarchic structure of society; it also suited illiteracy. Ideas conveyed by symbols in woodcuts were accessible to an illiterate population. By contrast, the advent of printing in the modern period led to the development of causal connections, employing the scientific method, for a literate population.

今日的AP ARALLEL

A PARALLEL FOR TODAY

15 世纪中叶，中世纪社会似乎在信仰上如此稳定和安全，但很快发生了变化。其主导机构——教会的垄断地位受到挑战和瓦解。几个世纪以来一直不容置疑的权威突然受到质疑。比起今天将任何公民与民族国家联系在一起的那些更为神圣的信仰和忠诚，在短短几年内就被重新考虑和抛弃，这一切都是因为 15 世纪最后十年兴起的一场技术革命。

Medieval society, seemingly so stable and secure in its beliefs in the middle of the fifteenth century, was rapidly transformed. Its predominant institution, the Church, saw its monopoly challenged and shattered. Authority that had been unquestioned for centuries was suddenly in dispute. Beliefs and loyalties more sacred than those that bind any citizen to a nation-state today were reconsidered and renounced within a few short years, all because of a technological revolution that came into its own in the last decade of the fifteenth century.

我们相信，五百年前那样的巨变将会再次发生。信息革命必将摧毁民族国家的权力垄断，正如火药革命摧毁教会的垄断一样。十五世纪末，人们的生活被有组织的宗教完全渗透，而今天，世界被政治所渗透，两者之间有着惊人的相似之处。当时的教会和今天的民族国家都是机构发展到极度衰老的例子。就像中世纪晚期的教会一样，二十世纪末的民族国家是一个负债累累的机构，再也无法维持其运转。它的运作越来越不相关，甚至对那些不久前可能是其最坚定支持者的人的繁荣产生反作用。

We believe that change as dramatic as that of five hundred years ago will happen again. The Information Revolution will destroy the monopoly of power of the nation-state as surely as the Gunpowder Revolution destroyed the Church’s monopoly. There is a striking analogy between the situation at the end of the fifteenth century, when life had become thoroughly saturated by organized religion, and that of today, when the world has become saturated with politics. The Church then and the nation-state today are both examples of institutions grown to a senile extreme. Like the late-medieval Church, the nation-state at the end of the twentieth century is a deeply indebted institution that can no longer pay its way. Its operations are ever more irrelevant and even counterproductive to the prosperity of those who not long ago might have been its staunchest supporters.

“贫困、贪婪、奢侈”

“Impoverished, Grasping, and Extravagant”

正如今天的政府所收取的钱财价值很低一样，15 世纪末的教会也是如此。正如教会历史学家尤安·卡梅伦 (Euan Cameron) 曾说：“贫困的地方神职人员似乎无法提供与其索取的金钱相匹配的服务；征收的大部分税款实际上“消失”在封闭的修道院或高等教育或行政管理的神秘领域。尽管教会的某些部门得到了大量捐赠，但整个机构却同时显得贫困、贪婪和奢侈。” ³³很难否认这与 20 世纪末的政府有相似之处。

Just as government today offers poor value for the money it collects, so did the Church at the end of the fifteenth century. As ecclesiastical historian Euan Cameron put it, “[A]n impoverished local priesthood seemed to offer a poor service for the money it demanded; much of what was levied effectively ‘disappeared” into enclosed monasteries or the arcane areas of higher education or administration. In spite of gifts prodigally given to some sectors of the Church, the institution as a whole managed to appear simultaneously impoverished, grasping, and extravagant.”³³ It would be hard to deny the parallel with late-twentieth-century government.

15 世纪后期的宗教仪式发展得像今天福利国家中不断增加的仪式一样。不仅特殊的祝福仪式不断增加，圣人和圣人的遗骨也不断增加，而且每年都有更多教堂、更多修道院、更多修道院、更多修道士、更多忏悔神父（常驻家庭牧师）、更多传教士、更多大教堂分会、更多捐赠的礼拜堂、更多遗物崇拜、更多宗教团体、更多宗教节日和新圣日。礼拜时间越来越长。祈祷和赞美诗变得越来越复杂。一个接一个，新的托钵僧团出现来乞讨施舍。其结果是机构负担过重，类似于今天高度政治化的社会所特有的负担。

Religious observances in the late fifteenth century grew like programs proliferating in welfare states today. Not only did special benedictions multiply endlessly, along with the supply of saints and saints’ bones, but every year there were more churches, more convents, more monasteries, more friaries, more confessors (resident household priests), more preacherships, more cathedral chapters, more endowed chantries, more relic cults, more religious co-fraternities, more religious festivals, and new holy days. Services grew longer. Prayers and hymns grew more complicated. One after another, new mendicant orders appeared to beg for alms. The result was institutional overload similar to that characterizing heavily politicized societies today.

宗教节日和节期在各个方面都激增。宗教仪式越来越多，有专门的节日来纪念玛利亚、她的姐妹和耶稣谱系的所有圣徒的七次苦难。34^信徒履行宗教义务变得越来越昂贵和繁重，就像今天遵守法律的成本激增一样。

Religious festivals and feast days proliferated on all sides. Religious services grew more numerous, with special festivals in honor of the seven sorrows of Mary, of her sisters, and of all the saints of Jesus’ genealogy.³⁴ For the faithful to meet their religious obligations became increasingly costly and burdensome, much as the costs of remaining within the law have proliferated today.

无辜者付出代价

Innocents Pay

当时和现在一样，生产者承受着越来越重的收入再分配负担。由于资本用途的转变，这些成本的上升速度比任何当权者都认识到的要快得多。与货币资本相比，持有土地的相对优势正在下降。然而，中世纪的思想仍然以地位为约束的社会来思考，社会地位取决于你是谁，而不是你有效部署资本的技能。很少或根本没有考虑到举办夸张的宗教仪式所带来的不断上升的机会成本。这些成本最沉重地落在了更有野心和勤劳的农民、市民和自耕农身上，他们比贵族更依赖资本的有效部署。他们不得不承担在无休止的节日和圣日（假期）上布置餐桌的不成比例的成本，以及支付支持奢侈的教会官僚机构的费用。

Then as now, the productive bore a growing burden of income redistribution. These costs were rising more sharply than anyone in authority recognized because of a shift in the use of capital. The relative advantage of holding land as compared to money capital was falling. Yet the medieval mind continued to think in terms of a status-bound society, where social position was determined by who you were, rather than by your skill in deploying capital effectively. Little or no consideration was given to the rising opportunity costs of staging exaggerated religious observances. These costs fell most heavily upon the more ambitious and hardworking peasants, burghers, and yeoman farmers, who depended more than the aristocracy upon deploying their capital usefully. They were obliged to shoulder a disproportionate cost of outfitting the tables at the endless feasts and holy days (holidays), as well as paying to support an extravagant Church bureaucracy.

适得其反的监管

Counterproductive Regulation

15 世纪末，教会在很大程度上控制了政府后来掌握的监管权力。教会主导着重要的法律领域，记录契约、登记婚姻、认证遗嘱、许可贸易、授予土地所有权以及规定商业条款和条件。生活细节几乎完全由教会法来规范，就像今天由官僚机构来规范一样，目的也大致相同。正如今天的政治法规充斥着混乱和矛盾一样，五百年前的教会法也是如此。这些法规经常压制和复杂化商业，表明促进生产力并不是监管者的想法。

At the end of the fifteenth century, the Church largely controlled the regulatory powers that have since been assumed by governments. The Church dominated important areas of law, recording deeds, registering marriages, probating wills, licensing trades, titling land, and stipulating terms and conditions of commerce. The details of life were almost as thoroughly regulated by canon law as they are today by bureaucracy, and to much the same end. Just as political regulation today has become riddled with confusions and contradictions, so canon law was five hundred years ago. These regulations often suppressed and complicated commerce in ways that revealed that facilitating productivity was far from the minds of the regulators.

例如，禁止在最近的 12 月 28 日当天整整一年内做生意。因此，如果是星期二，则星期二不能做任何合法生意，这是对无辜者大屠杀的虔诚的义务表达。在 12 月 28 日不是星期日的年份，这项禁令阻碍了许多类型商业的潜力，通过延迟交易或完全阻止交易增加了成本。

For example, it was forbidden to do business for an entire year on whatever day of the week the most recent twenty-eighth of December happened to fall. Thus if it was a Tuesday, no legal business could be conducted on Tuesdays as an obligatory expression of piety in honor of the Slaughter of the Innocents. On years when December 28 fell on any day other than Sunday, this injunction hampered the potential for many types of commerce, increasing costs by delaying transactions or forestalling them altogether.

垄断定价

Monopoly Pricing

教会法也被用来加强垄断价格。教会从其在意大利托尔法的矿区开采的明矾的销售中获得了可观的收入。当一些纺织业客户表示更喜欢从土耳其进口的廉价明矾时，梵蒂冈试图通过教会法来维持其垄断价格，宣称使用价格较低的明矾是有罪的。坚持购买廉价土耳其产品的商人被逐出教会。著名的周五禁食肉令就是出于同样的精神。教会不仅是最大的封建土地所有者，还拥有大型渔业。教父们发现，虔诚的人有吃鱼的神学必要性，这在当时运输和卫生条件不利于鱼类消费的情况下，确保了他们的产品有需求，这并非偶然。

Canon law was also imposed to reinforce monopoly prices. The Church earned significant revenues from the sale of alum mined from its properties in Tolfa, Italy. When some of its customers in the textile industry showed a preference for cheaper alum imported from Turkey, the Vatican attempted to sustain its monopoly pricing through canon law, declaring it sinful to use the less costly alum. Merchants who persisted in purchasing the cheaper Turkish product were excommunicated. The famous ban on eating meat on Friday originated in the same spirit. The Church was not only the largest feudal landholder; it also held major fisheries. Church Fathers discovered a theological necessity for the pious to eat fish, which not incidentally ensured a demand for their product at a time when transport and sanitary conditions discouraged fish consumption.

和今天的民族国家一样，中世纪晚期的教会不仅监管特定行业以直接维护自己的利益，还充分利用其监管权力以其他方式为自己获取收入。教士们不遗余力地颁布难以遵守的法规和法令。例如，乱伦的定义非常广泛，即使是远房表亲和只有婚姻关系的人也需要教会的特别豁免才能结婚。由于这几乎涵盖了现代旅行时代之前许多欧洲小村庄的所有人，因此教会出售豁免权乱伦婚姻成为教会收入的一大来源。甚至婚姻内的性行为也受到教会法规的严格限制。夫妻之间的性关系在周日、周三和周五以及复活节和圣诞节前四十天都是非法的。此外，夫妻在领圣餐前三天不得发生性行为。换句话说，已婚夫妇一年中至少有 55% 的时间被禁止享受性生活。在《主教的妓院》一书中，历史学家 EJ Burford 认为，这些“愚蠢的”婚姻规定刺激了中世纪卖淫活动的增长，教会从中获利颇丰。35 Burford 报告说，温彻斯特主教在许多世纪里都是伦敦南华克区 Bankside 妓院的负责人。此外，教会^从卖淫中牟取暴利绝不仅仅是英国的地方事务：

Like the nation-state today, the late-medieval Church not only regulated specific industries to directly underpin its own interests; it also made the most of its regulatory powers to gain revenue for itself in other ways. Clerics went to special pains to promulgate regulations and edicts that were difficult to abide by. For example, incest was very broadly defined, so that even remote cousins and persons related only by marriage required special dispensation from the Church to marry. As this included almost everyone in many small European villages before the era of modern travel, selling waivers for incestuous marriages became a thriving source of Church revenue. Even sex within marriage itself was tightly circumscribed by ecclesiastic regulation. Sexual relations between spouses were illegal on Sundays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, as well as for forty days prior to Easter and Christmas. Further, couples were to abstain from sex for three days prior to receiving communion. In other words, married couples were forbidden to enjoy sex without an indulgence for a minimum of 55 percent of the days of the year. In The Bishop's Brothels, historian E. J. Burford suggests that these “idiotic” regulations of marriage helped stimulate the growth of medieval prostitution, from which the Church profited mightily.³⁵ Burford reports that the Bishop of Winchester was for many centuries the principal of London’s Bankside brothels in Southwark. Further, ecclesiastical profiteering from prostitution was by no means merely a local English affair:

教皇西克斯图斯四世（约 1471 年）据称从他的众多情妇之一那里感染了梅毒——成为第一位向妓女发放许可证并对其收入征税的教皇，在此过程中大大增加了教皇的收入。事实上，罗马教廷通过这种税收和许可证的出售为圣彼得大教堂的建设提供了部分资金。据说他的继任者教皇利奥十世通过出售许可证赚了大约两万两千个金币，是他在德国出售赎罪券所赚的四倍^。36

Pope Sixtus IV (c. 1471) who allegedly caught syphilis from one of his many mistresses—became the first pope to issue licences to prostitutes and to levy a tax on their earnings, augmenting vastly the papal revenues in the process. Indeed the Roman Curia partly financed the building of St. Peter’s by this tax and the sale of licences. His successor, Pope Leo X, is said to have made some twenty-two thousand gold ducats through the sale of licences, four times as much as he made by selling indulgences in Germany.³⁶

即使是著名的牧师独身规定，也是中世纪教会的一大收入来源。正如伯福德所报道的，教会强加了“一种被称为cullagium 的骗局”，即向“合妾的牧师”征收费用。37^事实证明，这项收费非常有利可图，以至于法国和德国的主教们都向所有牧师统一征收这项费用，尽管 1215 年的拉特兰会议谴责了“这种可耻的交易，这些主教经常通过这种交易来出售犯罪许可”。38^这只是出售违反教会法和法规的许可证的众多有利可图的市场之一，这种交易的动机与贪婪的政客寻求对商业的专断监管权的逻辑相同。

Even the famous rule of celibacy imposed on priests was a lucrative source of revenue for the medieval Church. As Burford reports, the Church imposed “a racket known as cullagium," a fee imposed upon “concubinary priests.”³⁷ This proved so lucrative that it was imposed uniformly upon all priests by bishops in France and Germany, in spite of the fact that the Lateran Council in 1215 had denounced “this disgraceful traffic by which such prelates regularly sell permission to sin.”³⁸ It was merely one of many lucrative markets for the sale of licenses to infringe canon law and regulation, a trade motivated by the same logic that impels grasping politicians to seek arbitrary regulatory powers over commerce.

赦罪

Indulgences

任意监管的权力也是出售豁免权的权力，以免受此类监管可能造成的伤害。教会出售许可证或“赦免”，授权一切，从减轻商业上的琐碎负担到允许在大斋节期间食用乳制品。这些“赦免”不仅以高价出售给贵族和富裕的市民。它们还被包装成彩票奖品，就像今天的政府经营的彩票一样，以吸引穷人的零钱。39^赎罪券交易增加因为教会的支出超过了其收入。这导致许多人推断出一个显而易见的事实，即制度化的教会主要利用其权力来增加收入。正如一位当代批评家所说，“[C]anon 法的制定完全是为了赚大钱；任何想成为基督徒的人都必须花钱摆脱它的规定。” ⁴⁰

The power to regulate arbitrarily is also the power to sell an exemption from the harm such regulations can do. The Church sold permits, or “indulgences,” authorizing everything from relief from petty burdens on commerce to permission to eat dairy products in Lent. These “indulgences” were not only sold at high prices to the aristocracy and the rich burghers. They were also packaged as lottery prizes much like the government-run lotteries of today to attract the pennies of the poor.³⁹ The trade in indulgences increased as the Church’s expenditures outran its income. This led many to infer the obvious, that the institutional Church was using its powers primarily to raise revenues. As a contemporary critic put it, “[C]anon law was instituted solely for the purpose of making a great deal of money; whoever would be a Christian has to buy his way out of its provisions.”⁴⁰

官僚体系负担过重

Bureaucratic Overload

15 世纪末，支持制度化宗教的成本已达到历史最高水平，就像支持政府的成本已达到如今的极端水平一样。宗教越是渗透到生活，教会就越昂贵，越是官僚化。用卡梅伦的话来说，“中世纪末期，找到人来填补教会大量增加的职位要比找到钱来支付这些职位容易得多。” ⁴¹就像今天破产的政府以适得其反的方式筹集收入一样，五百年前的教会也是如此。事实上，教士们使用的一些掠夺性伎俩与今天的政客所掌握的一样。

The costs of supporting institutionalized religion at the end of the fifteenth century had reached a historic extreme, much as the costs of supporting government have reached a senile extreme today. The more life was saturated with religion, the more expensive and bureaucratic the Church became. In Cameron’s words, “It was far easier to find people to fill the vastly increased number of Church posts at the end of the Middle Ages, than to find money to pay for them.”⁴¹ Just as bankrupt governments today scrounge for revenues in counterproductive ways, so did the Church five hundred years ago. Indeed, the churchmen used some of the same predatory tricks mastered by the politicians today.

五百年前的中世纪教会，就像今天的民族国家一样，消耗了比以往任何时候更多的社会资源。当时的教会，就像今天的国家一样，似乎无法依靠创纪录的收入来运作和维持。正如国家逐渐主宰了后工业化经济，花费了西欧一些国家一半以上的收入一样，教会主宰了后封建经济，消耗资源并阻碍了增长。

The medieval Church five hundred years ago, like the nation-state today, consumed more of society’s resources than it ever had before, or ever would again. The Church then, like the state today, seemed incapable of functioning and sustaining itself on even record amounts of revenue. Just as the state has come to dominate late-industrial economies, spending more than half of all revenue in some Western European countries, so the Church dominated the late-feudal economy, draining resources and retarding growth.

十五世纪的赤字支出

Deficit Spending in the Fifteenth Century

教会想尽一切办法从其收费中榨取更多的钱来养活其过度膨胀的官僚机构。直接受教会统治的地区被要求缴纳越来越多的税款。在教会缺乏直接征税权的省份和王国，梵蒂冈强加了“年金”，即由当地君主支付的款项，以代替直接的教会税。

The Church resorted to every conceivable expedient to squeeze more money out of its charges to feed its overgrown bureaucracy. Regions directly under the lordship of the Church were required to pay higher and higher taxes. In provinces and kingdoms where the Church lacked direct taxing power, the Vatican imposed “annates,” a payment to be made by the local sovereign in lieu of direct ecclesiastic taxes.

教会和今天的国家一样，也侵吞了自己的金库，挪用了专项捐赠的资金来支付一般的管理费用。教士俸禄和腐败的宗教职位被公开出售，什一税的收入也是如此。实际上，什一税的利益就成了教会的等价物，相当于现代政府为弥补长期赤字而发行的债券。

The Church, like the state today, also raided its own coffers, diverting funds from benefactions earmarked for specific uses to pay for general overhead expenses. Benefices and venal religious offices were openly sold, as were the income streams from tithes. In effect, the interests in tithes became the ecclesiastic equivalent of bonds issued by modern governments to finance their chronic deficits.

虽然教会是封建主义的意识形态捍卫者，批判商业和资本主义，但就像今天的民族国家一样，它利用了每一个教会利用现有的营销技巧来优化自己的收入。教会在圣礼销售方面经营着一项兴旺的生意，包括圣烛、圣枝主日祝福的棕榈、“圣母升天节祝福的草药，尤其是圣水的种类。” ⁴²

While the Church was the ideological defender of feudalism and critic of commerce and capitalism, like the nation-state today, it utilized every available marketing technique to optimize its own revenues. The Church operated a thriving business in the sale of sacramentals, including consecrated candles, palms blessed on Palm Sunday, “herbs blessed on the Feast of the Assumption, and especially the varieties of Holy Water.”⁴²

就像今天的政客威胁选民，如果他们拒绝缴纳更高的税款，就会减少垃圾收集和其他侮辱，15 世纪的宗教当局也倾向于切断宗教服务，以勒索会众支付任意罚款。罚款通常是因为少数人犯下的一些轻微罪行，而这些人甚至不必是相关会众的成员。例如，1436 年，雅克·杜·夏特利尔主教“是一个非常浮夸、贪婪的人”，关闭了巴黎的无辜者教堂 22 天，停止了所有宗教服务，等待两名乞丐支付一笔巨额罚款。这两个人在教堂里吵架，流了几滴血，主教声称这已经亵渎了教堂。在他支付罚款之前，他不允许任何人在教堂举行婚礼、葬礼或日历上的正常圣礼^。43

Like today’s politicians who threaten constituents with curtailed garbage pickup and other indignities if they decline to pay higher taxes, religious authorities in the fifteenth century were also prone to cutting off religious services to blackmail congregations into paying arbitrary fines. Often the fines were imposed for some petty offense done by a few persons who need not even have been members of the congregation in question. For example, in 1436, Bishop Jacques Du Chatelier, “a very ostentatious, grasping man,” closed the Church of the Innocents in Paris for twenty-two days, halting all religious services while waiting for an impossibly large fine to be paid by two beggars. The men had quarreled in the church and shed a few drops of blood, which the bishop claimed had deconsecrated the church. He would not allow anyone to use the church for weddings, burials, or the normal sacraments of the calendar until his fine was paid.⁴³

意大利炖菜（让教皇高兴）

一年支付了两万达克。

此外，他们还给了一位牧师（修改了他的费用）

一个妓女的利润，或者两个或三个妓女的利润……

我觉得这一定是一个糟糕的神

和斯图斯有如此密切的关系^。44

—十五世纪英国民谣

The Italian Stewes (to make the Pope good cheer)

payd twentie thousand Duckets in a yeere.

Besides they give a Priest (t’amend his fee)

the profit of a whore, or two or three.…

Methinkes it must be a bad Divintie

that with the Stewes hath such affinitie.⁴⁴

—FIFTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLISH BALLAD

仇恨教会领袖

Hatred of Church Leaders

难怪 15 世纪末期的普遍观点鄙视高级和低级神职人员，就像当今高度政治化的社会普遍观点鄙视官僚和政客一样。正如约翰·赫伊津哈所说：“仇恨是在这种情况下使用的正确词语，因为仇恨是潜在的，但普遍而持久的。人们从不厌倦听到对神职人员恶行的指责。” ⁴⁵人们普遍认为教会“贪婪而奢侈”的部分原因是事实确实如此。“高级神职人员的世俗化和低级神职人员的堕落” ⁴⁶太明显了，不容忽视。从教区牧师到教皇本人，神职人员似乎都很腐败，只有主要机构的人员才会如此。

Little wonder that the common opinion of the late fifteenth century despised the higher and lower clergy, much as common opinion in highly politicized societies today despises the bureaucracy and politicians. As Johan Huizinga put it, “Hatred is the right word to use in this context, for hatred it was, latent, but general and persistent. The people never wearied of hearing the vices of the clergy arraigned.”⁴⁵ Part of the reason that people were commonly convinced that the Church was “grasping and extravagant” is that it was true. “The worldliness of the higher ranks of the clergy and the deterioration of the lower grades”⁴⁶ were too obvious to miss. From the parish priest to the pope himself, the clergy appeared to be corrupt as only the personnel of a predominant institution can be.

五百年前，教皇亚历山大六世甚至让朱利奥·安德烈奥蒂和比尔·克林顿都看起来像是正直的典范。亚历山大六世亚历山大^{· ...}​

Five hundred years ago, the pope, Alexander VI, made even Giulio Andreotti and Bill Clinton seem like exemplars of integrity. Alexander VI was known for his wild parties. As a cardinal in Siena, he staged a famous orgy to which only “Siena’s most beautiful young women had been invited, but their ‘husbands, fathers, and brothers’ had been excluded.”⁴⁷ The Siena orgy was famous, but it later proved to be tame compared to those Alexander threw after becoming pope. Perhaps the most lurid of those was the so-called Ballet of the Chestnuts, which involved Rome’s “fifty most beautiful whores” in a copulation contest with the Church Fathers and other important Romans. As William Manchester describes it, “Servants kept score of each man’s orgasms, for the pope greatly admired virility.… After everyone was exhausted, His Holiness distributed prizes—cloaks, boots, caps, and fine silken tunics. The winners, the diarist wrote, were those who made love with those courtesans the greatest number of times.”⁴⁸

亚历山大至少有七个，也许八个私生子。其中一个是他的儿子，乔凡尼，也就是所谓的罗马之子，是亚历山大的私生女卢克雷齐娅·博吉亚在她十八岁时所生。在一份秘密的教皇诏书中，亚历山大承认乔凡尼是他的孩子。如果他不是孩子的父亲，那他肯定是双方的祖父。教皇与卢克雷齐娅有三人乱伦的风流韵事，卢克雷齐娅也是亚历山大最大的私生子甘迪亚公爵胡安的情妇，也是另一个私生子红衣主教切萨雷·博吉亚的情妇。切萨雷是教会的王子，尼科洛·马基亚维利就是《君主论》的灵感来源。切萨雷是个杀手，教皇也是，众所周知，他策划了好几起谋杀案。他们中显然有一人嫉妒胡安，1497 年 6 月 15 日，胡安的尸体被从台伯河中打捞上来^。49

Alexander fathered at least seven and perhaps eight illegitimate children. One of his apparent sons, Giovanni, was the so-called Infans Romanus, born to Alexander’s illegitimate daughter, Lucrezia Borgia, when she was eighteen. In a secret papal bull, Alexander admitted fathering Giovanni. If he was not the father, he was certainly the grandfather on both sides. The pope was involved in a three-way incestuous affair with Lucrezia, who was also the mistress of Juan, duke of Gandia, Alexander’s oldest illegitimate son, as well as the mistress of another illegitimate son, Cardinal Cesare Borgia. Cesare was the prince of the Church who served as Niccolò Machia-velli’s inspiration for The Prince. Cesare was a killer, as was the pope, who was known to have plotted several murders. One or the other of them apparently became jealous of Juan, whose lifeless body was fished out of the Tiber River on June 15, 1497.⁴⁹

中世纪晚期教会的领导层与当今民族国家的领导层一样腐败。

The leadership of the late-medieval Church was as corrupt as the leadership of the nation-state today.

“今天我两次成为父亲。感谢上帝的祝福。” ⁵⁰

——罗道夫·格里科拉在当选修道院院长的那天，听说他的小妾生了一个儿子

“Today I have twice become a father. God’s blessing on it.”⁵⁰

—RODOLPH AGRICOLA, on hearing that his concubine had given birth to a son on the day he was elected abbot

虚伪​

HYPOCRISY

在“虔诚的外表下”，中世纪晚期的社会是极其亵渎、不敬和放荡的。教堂是年轻男女最喜欢的幽会场所，也是妓女和淫秽图片贩卖者经常聚集的地方。历史学家报告说，“日常宗教活动中的不敬行为几乎是无止境的。” ⁵¹唱诗班成员受雇为死者的灵魂吟唱通常代替弥撒中的亵渎话语。守夜和游行在中世纪的宗教活动中发挥的作用比今天大得多，但“却被下流、嘲弄和饮酒所玷污。”中世纪晚期欧洲的神学权威加尔都西会的丹尼斯如是说^。52

Beneath a “superficial crust of piety,” late-medieval society was remarkably blasphemous, irreverent, and debauched. Churches were the favorite trysting places of young men and women, and frequent gathering spots of prostitutes and vendors of obscene pictures. Historians report that “the irreverence of daily religious practice was almost unbounded.”⁵¹ Choristers hired to chant for the souls of the dead commonly substituted profane words in the mass. Vigils and processions, which played a far bigger role in medieval religious practice than they do today, were nonetheless “disgraced by ribaldry, mockery and drinking.” So said late-medieval Europe’s leading theological authority, Denis the Carthusian.⁵²

虽然这样的报道可能会被质疑为一个固执的道德家的牢骚，但它只是描绘同一画面的众多报道之一。有充分的理由相信，淫秽和神圣在中世纪生活中经常是亲密的伙伴。例如，朝圣经常沦为骚乱和放荡，以至于高尚的改革者主张禁止朝圣，但没有成功。当地的宗教游行也为暴徒提供了定期破坏、抢劫和沉迷于他们喜欢的任何醉酒行为的机会。即使人们静静地坐着听弥撒，也常常不是一种清醒的体验。教堂里喝了大量的酒，尤其是在节日之夜。斯特拉斯堡议会的记录显示，那些在圣阿道夫之夜“守夜祈祷”的人喝了议会为纪念圣人提供的 1,100 升葡萄酒。

While such a report could be challenged as the griping of a stiff-lipped moralist, it is merely one of many accounts that paint the same picture. There is ample reason to believe that the bawdy and the sacred were frequently close companions in medieval life. Pilgrimages, for example, so often degenerated into riot and debauchery that high-minded reformers argued without success that they be suppressed. Local religious processions also provided regular occasions for mobs to vandalize, loot, and generally indulge in whatever drunken antics caught their fancy. Even when people sat still to hear mass, it was frequently not a sober experience. Prodigious quantities of wine were consumed in church, especially on festival nights. Accounts from the Council of Strasbourg show that those who “watched in prayer” on St. Adolphus Night drank 1,100 liters of wine provided by the council in honor of the saint.

15 世纪著名神学家吉恩·格尔森 (Jean Gerson) 报告说，“最神圣的节日，甚至是圣诞夜”，人们都“在放荡、打牌、咒骂和亵渎中度过”。当普通民众因这些过失受到警告时，他们“以贵族和神职人员为榜样，他们也做着同样的事情，却不受惩罚” ^。53

Jean Gerson, a leading fifteenth-century theologian, reports that “the most sacred festivals, even Christmas night,” were spent “in debauchery, playing at cards, swearing and blaspheming.” When admonished for these lapses, the common people “plead the example of the nobility and the clergy, who behave in like manner with impunity.”⁵³

虔诚与慈悲

Piety and Compassion

中世纪晚期，虔诚使有组织的宗教充斥社会成为合理化，而“同情心”的作用与今天用来为政治统治生活辩护的“同情心”是一样的。出售赎罪券以满足对虔诚的渴望而没有道德，这与奢侈的福利支出相类似，以消除没有慈善的同情心的伪装。人们接受的做法的实际效果是改善道德品质还是拯救灵魂，这在很大程度上并不重要，就像福利计划是否真正改善了其所针对的人的生活一样，在很大程度上并不重要。“虔诚”和“同情心”一样，是一种近乎迷信的祈求。

The piety that rationalized the saturation of society by organized religion in the late Middle Ages served the same purpose as the “compassion” that is meant to justify the political domination of life today. The sale of indulgences to satisfy a desire for piety without morals parallels lavish welfare spending to slake the pretense of compassion without charity. It was largely immaterial whether the actual effect of received practices was to improve moral character or save souls, just as it is largely immaterial whether a welfare program actually improves the lives of the people to whom it is directed. “Piety,” like “compassion,” was an almost superstitious invocation.

在因果关系几乎不被理解的时代，教会的仪式和圣礼渗透到了生活的每一个阶段。“……一次旅行、一项任务、一次拜访，都同样需要上千种礼节：祝福、仪式、仪式。” ⁵⁴写在羊皮纸上的祈祷词像项链一样串在发烧的人身上。营养不良的女孩们把头发披在圣乌尔班的画像前，以防止脱发进一步加剧。纳瓦拉的农民在干旱期间在圣彼得像后面游行祈雨。55人们热切地采用这些和其他“在没有有效方法时缓解焦虑的无效方法^{” 。56}

In a time when causal relationships were scarcely understood, rituals and sacraments of the Church permeated every phase of life. “… A journey, a task, a visit, were equally attended by a thousand formalities: benedictions, ceremonies, formulas.”⁵⁴ Prayers inscribed on pieces of parchment were strung like necklaces on those suffering from fevers. Malnourished girls draped locks of their hair in front of the image of St. Urban to prevent further hair loss. Peasants in Navarre marched in processions behind an image of St. Peter to solicit rain during droughts.⁵⁵ People eagerly adopted these and other “ineffective techniques to allay anxiety when effective ones were not available.”⁵⁶

两种错误仪式

Two Wrongs to Make a Rite

人们坚信圣人的遗物具有神奇的品质，因此任何虔诚的人去世后，人们都经常会疯狂地分割遗体。托马斯·阿奎那在福萨诺瓦修道院去世后，那里的僧侣们将他的头斩首并煮沸，以确保对他骨头的控制。当匈牙利的圣伊丽莎白躺在遗体上时，“一群信徒过来，把裹着她脸的亚麻布剪成条或撕成条；他们剪掉了头发、指甲，甚至乳头。” ⁵⁷

People were so firmly convinced of the miraculous qualities attaching to the relics of saints that the death of any notably pious person frequently occasioned a mad rush to divide up the body. After Thomas Aquinas died in the monastery of Fossanuova, the monks there decapitated and boiled his body in order to secure control of his bones. When St. Elizabeth of Hungary was lying in state, “a crowd of worshippers came and cut or tore strips of the linen enveloping her face; they cut off the hair, the nails, even the nipples.”⁵⁷

虔诚而无美德

Piety Without Virtue

在中世纪，人们将圣人和他们的遗物视为信仰的一部分，因为当时的世界比本书的任何读者想象的都要寒冷，夜晚更加黑暗，面对疾病时更加绝望。与现代相比，中世纪的人们更加坚信恶魔是真实存在的，上帝积极干预世界，祈祷、忏悔和朝圣能赢得神的恩宠。

The medieval mind saw the saints and their relics as part of the arsenal of faith in a world that was colder in winter, darker at night, and more desperate in the face of disease than any reader of this book will have been likely to know. More emphatically than in the modern period, people in the Middle Ages believed that demons were real, that God actively intervened in the world, and that prayer, penance, and pilgrimages earned divine favor.

简单地说人们信仰上帝，既不能表达出他们信仰的强烈程度，也不能表达出中世纪虔诚与罪恶的共存似乎很容易。人们对仪式、礼仪和圣礼的有效性的信仰是如此普遍，以至于它也许不可避免地削弱了以道德的方式行事的紧迫性。对于任何罪恶或精神缺陷，都有一种补救措施，一种可以洗清罪孽的忏悔，这就是后来的“救赎数学”。58^宗教变得如此无处不在，以至于它的真诚性必然开始消退。正如赫伊津哈所说：“宗教渗透到生活中的所有关系中，意味着神圣和世俗思想领域的不断融合。神圣的东西将变得太平凡，以至于无法深刻感受到。” ⁵⁹事实就是这样。

To say simply that people believed in God could convey neither the intensity of their adherence nor the apparent ease with which medieval piety seemed to bed down with sin. Belief in the efficacy of rites, rituals, and sacraments was so pervasive that it perhaps inevitably undercut the urgency of behaving in a virtuous way. For any sin or spiritual defect there was a remedy, a penance that would clear the slate, in what came to be a “mathematics of salvation.”⁵⁸ Religion became so all-pervasive that its sincerity necessarily began to flag. As Huizinga put it, “Religion penetrating all relations in life means a constant blending of the spheres of holy and of profane thought. Holy things will become too common to be deeply felt.”⁵⁹ And so it was.

缩小教会规模​

DOWNSIZING THE CHURCH

到 15 世纪末，教会不仅像今天的民族国家一样腐败，而且严重拖累了经济增长。教会以非生产性的方式吸纳了大量资本，施加了限制社会产出的负担并抑制了商业。这些负担，就像今天民族国家强加的负担一样，是很多的。我们知道火药革命后有组织的宗教发生了什么：它产生了强烈的动机来缩小宗教机构的规模并降低其成本。当传统教会拒绝这样做时，新教教派抓住了竞争的机会。他们几乎用尽了所有可以想象到的方法来降低虔诚生活的成本：

By the end of the fifteenth century, the Church was not only as corrupt as the nation-state today; it was also a major drag on economic growth. The Church engrossed large amounts of capital in unproductive ways, imposing burdens that limited the output of society and suppressed commerce. These burdens, like those imposed by the nation-state today, were numerous. We know what happened to organized religion in the wake of the Gunpowder Revolution: it created strong incentives to downsize religious institutions and lower their costs. When the traditional Church declined to do this, Protestant sects seized the opportunity to compete. In so doing they employed almost every device imaginable to reduce the cost of living a-pious life:

• 他们建造了多余的新教堂，有时还拆除了旧教堂的祭坛，以腾出资金用于其他用途。
• They built spare new churches and sometimes stripped the altars of older ones to free capital for other uses.
• 他们以降低成本的方式修改了基督教教义，强调信仰而非善行才是救赎的关键。
• They revised Christian doctrine in ways that lowered costs, emphasizing faith over good deeds as a key to salvation.
• 他们制定了新的、简洁的礼拜仪式，削减或取消了节日，并废除了许多圣礼。
• They developed a new, terse liturgy, pared or eliminated feast days, and abolished numerous sacraments.
• 他们关闭了修道院和修女院，并停止向托钵僧团提供施舍。贫困从一种使徒美德变成了一种不受欢迎且常常应受谴责的社会问题^。60
• They closed monasteries and nunneries, and stopped giving alms to mendicant orders. Poverty went from being an apostolic virtue to an unwelcome and often blameworthy social problem.⁶⁰

要理解教会规模缩小如何解放了生产力，你必须回顾教会在垄断地位被打破之前阻碍增长的诸多方式。就像今天的民族国家一样，15 世纪末的教会施加了令人难以置信的超额成本负担。

To understand how downsizing the Church liberated productivity, you have to review the many ways that the Church stood in the way of growth before its monopoly was broken. Much as the nation-state does today, the Church at the end of the fifteenth century imposed an incredible burden of excess costs.

1. 什一税、税收和费用等直接成本助长了过度膨胀的教会官僚机构。什一税在取代中世纪“圣母教堂”的新教教堂中也很常见，但在城市地区往往无法征收。实际上，教会垄断地位的终结导致商业最发达地区的边际税率下降。

1. Direct costs such as tithes, taxes, and fees fed the overgrown ecclesiastical bureaucracy. Tithes were common to Protestant churches that replaced the medieval “Holy Mother Church” also, but they tended not to be collectible in urban areas. In effect, the end of the Church’s monopoly led to declining marginal tax rates in regions with the most highly developed commerce.

2. 宗教教义使储蓄变得困难。中世纪教会的头号恶棍是“守财奴”，他们为了储蓄黄金不惜冒着灵魂的风险。要求信徒资助“善行”意味着要向教会缴纳高额捐款。“补偿”教义迫使那些关心救赎的人捐赠弥撒或“唱诗班”，以避免炼狱。路德在他的九十五条论纲的第八和第十三条中直接抨击了这一点。他写道：“垂死的人将以他们的死亡偿还所有的债务。” ⁶¹换句话说，新教信徒的资本可以传给他的继承人。根据新教教义，没有必要捐赠唱诗班来重复弥撒，通常是三十年，有时，对于非常富有的人来说，是永久的。

2. Religious doctrines made saving difficult. The arch-villain of the medieval Church was the “miser,” the person who saved his gold at the risk of his soul. The requirement for the faithful to fund “good deeds” entailed costly contributions to the Church. The doctrine of “satisfactions” obliged those concerned about salvation to endow masses or “chantries” in order to avoid purgatory. Luther attacked this directly in the eighth and thirteenth of his ninety-five theses. He wrote that “the dying will pay all their debts by their death.”⁶¹ In other words, the capital of the Protestant believer was available to pass on to his heirs. Under Protestant doctrine, there was no need to endow chantries to repeat masses, usually for thirty years, and sometimes, for the very wealthy, in perpetuity.

3. 中世纪教会的意识形态也鼓励资本转向购买圣物。许多圣物崇拜都带有巨额资金用于购买与基督或各种圣徒有关的实物。富人甚至会收集个人遗物。例如，萨克森选帝侯弗雷德里克收集了一万九千件遗物，其中一些是在 1493 年去耶路撒冷朝圣时获得的。他的藏品包括他认为是“圣洁无辜者的尸体、玛丽的奶和耶稣降生马厩里的稻草”。62^据推测，投资于这些遗物的资本回报率很低。转向强调信仰和选民的概念，降低了购买基督教生活装饰品作为护身符的重要性，并鼓励金钱找到更有生产力的渠道，为君主带来回报。

3. The ideology of the medieval Church also encouraged diversion of capital into acquisition of relics. Numerous relic cults were endowed with large sums to acquire physical objects associated with Christ or various saints. The very wealthy even assembled personal collections of relics. For example, the Elector Frederick of Saxony amassed a collection of nineteen thousand relics, some acquired on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem in 1493. His collection included what he believed to be “the body of a holy innocent, Mary’s milk, and straw from the stable of the Nativity.”⁶² Presumably, the return on capital invested in these relics was low. The shift to an emphasis on faith and the notion of the elect downgraded the importance of acquisition of the trappings of Christian life for use as charms and encouraged money to find more productive channels that paid a return that the monarch could tap.

4. 新教教派的出现打破了中世纪教会的经济垄断，并导致监管力度大大减弱。正如我们所见，教会法经常被曲解以支持教会的垄断和商业利益。由于新教派需要保护和促进的经济利益较少，因此其宗教教义版本往往会形成一个更自由的体系，对商业的限制较少。

4. The advent of Protestant denominations broke the medieval Church’s economic monopolies, and led to a significant weakening of regulation. As we have seen, canon law was frequently bent to support Church monopolies and commercial interests. Because the new denominations had fewer economic interests to protect and promote, their version of religious doctrine tended to result in a freer system, with fewer inhibitions of commerce.

5. 新教革命废除了中世纪教会的许多仪式和礼仪，这些仪式和礼仪占用了信徒的时间。到 15 世纪末，仪式、圣礼和圣日已经发展到几乎占据了整个日历。这种仪式的过度使用是教会坚持“人们可以随心所欲地增加祈祷或礼拜活动并从中受益”的逻辑结果。63^他们确实增加了。更长更复杂的服务、忏悔中背诵重复祈祷的义务以及圣徒节日的增多，这些都对生产力造成了负担，在此期间不能进行任何工作。每天和每个季节都有大量的规定和仪式，大大减少了可用于生产任务的时间。这可能对打断中世纪农业的节奏影响不大，因为 90% 或更多的人口都从事农业。在季节中有许多时期不需要每天进行田间劳动。中世纪条件下农作物的产量可能更多地受到天气和无法控制的虫害节奏的影响，而不是教会日历所规定的最低限度以外的任何边际劳动力的增加。

5. The Protestant revolution abolished many of the rites and rituals of the medieval Church that burdened the time of the faithful. Rites, sacraments, and holy days had been elaborated to absorb almost the entire calendar by the late fifteenth century. This ceremonial overload was a logical outgrowth of the Church’s insistence “that one could multiply acts of prayer or worship as often as one liked and gain benefits from them.”⁶³ Multiply they did. Productivity was taxed by longer and more elaborate services, obligations to recite repetitious prayers in penance, and the proliferation of feast days of saints during which no work could be done. Numerous regulations and ceremonies punctuated the day and the seasons, considerably shrinking the time available for productive tasks. This may have done little to interrupt the rhythms of medieval farming, in which 90 percent or more of the population was engaged. There were many periods during the seasons when field labor was not required on a daily basis. The yield of crops under medieval conditions probably varied more with the weather and uncontrollable rhythms of infestation than from any marginal addition of labor beyond the minimum that the Church calendar accommodated.

生产力损失这一更大问题并不像其他领域那样严重，它主要出现在农业领域。教会对时间的要求与手工艺、制造、运输、商业或任何其他行业都不太相容，因为在这些行业中，生产力和盈利能力很可能取决于投入到任务中的时间量。

The larger problem of lost productivity did not fall so much in farming as in other areas. The Church’s demands on time were far less compatible with craft work, manufacturing, transport, commerce, or any other undertaking where productivity and profitability were likely to be crucially determined by the amount of time devoted to the task.

15 世纪末的大转型发生在地租上涨、农民实际工资下降的时期，这可能并非巧合。人口压力的增加公共土地的产量下降，这些土地通常位于河流和溪流周围，农民依靠这些土地放牧牲畜，有时也捕鱼和烧柴。生活水平的下降给农民带来了越来越紧迫的压力，迫使他们寻找其他收入来源。结果，“越来越多的农村人口转向小规模制造业，尤其是纺织品制造业，这一过程被称为‘出让’或‘原始工业化’。” ⁶⁴教会强加的仪式性时间负担阻碍了更有抱负的农民通过手工艺来补充农业收入的努力，事实上，它们阻碍了任何向新的经济方向重新部署的努力。

It may not be a coincidence that the great transition at the end of the fifteenth century occurred at a time when land rents were rising and real wages for the peasantry were in decline. Increased population pressures had reduced the yield from the common lands, often found surrounding rivers and streams, upon which peasants depended to graze their livestock, and in some cases, for fish and firewood. The whittling down of living standards placed increasingly urgent pressures on peasants to find alternative sources of income. As a result, “more and more of the rural population turned to small-scale manufacturing for the market, above all in textiles, in the process known as ‘putting-out’ or ‘proto-industrialization.’ ”⁶⁴ The ceremonial burdens on time imposed by the Church stood in the way of efforts by the more ambitious peasants to supplement their farming income by craft work, as indeed they inhibited any redeployment of effort in new economic directions.

新教教派对生产力做出的最显著贡献之一是废除了四十个节日。这不仅节省了举办节日的大量成本，包括为村庄餐桌提供食物和饮料；还节省了大量宝贵的时间。这意味着，每个不再庆祝四十个节日的人都可以为其年度生产力增加三百个工时或更多。简而言之，废除中世纪教堂的仪式负担过重为产量的显着增加开辟了道路，只需腾出原本会浪费在商业上的时间即可。

One of the more pronounced contributions that Protestant sects made to productivity was the scrapping of forty feast days. This not only saved the considerable costs of staging the festivals, including outfitting the village tables with food and drink; it also freed a great deal of valuable time. Implicitly, everyone who stopped honoring the forty banished feast days could add three hundred man-hours or more to his annual productivity. In short, the scrapping of ceremonial overload in the medieval Church opened the way for an appreciable increase in output simply by freeing time that would otherwise have been lost to commerce.

6. 教会垄断地位的瓦解导致教会管理下收益低下的大量资产被收回——这种情况与 20 世纪末的国家持有情况明显相似。教会是迄今为止最大的封建土地所有者。其对土地的控制与当今高度政治化的社会中的国家相当——在波西米亚等一些欧洲国家，其土地占总土地的 50% 以上。根据教会法，一旦财产被教会控制，就不能转让。因此，随着教会从信徒那里收到越来越多的遗嘱礼物，用于资助各种社会福利服务、教堂和其他活动，教会土地持有量趋于稳步上升。

6. The break in the Church’s monopoly disgorged vast amounts of assets that were yielding low returns under Church management—a situation with obvious parallels to state holdings late in the twentieth century. The Church was the largest feudal landholder by far. Its grip on the land matched that of the state in highly politicized societies today—exceeding 50 percent of the total in some European countries such as Bohemia. According to canon law, once a property came under the control of the Church, it could not be alienated. Thus the holdings of Church land tended steadily to rise, as the Church received more and more testamentary gifts from the faithful for financing various social welfare services, chantries, and other activities.

虽然很难准确衡量教会财产的相对生产力，但中世纪末期的生产力肯定比中世纪早期低得多。到 14 世纪，人们越来越重视为市场生产而不是自给自足的农业，这导致大多数世俗领主从文盲头目转变为专业经理人，以优化其财产的产出。他们的动机可能使他们的产出迅速超过教会财产的产出，而教会财产在理论上通常不会为任何人带来私利。毫无疑问，一些更世俗的王子主教以与世俗领主无异的方式管理他们的庄园。然而，其他教会财产的生产力肯定会因庞大而广泛的机构管理不善而受到影响，其缺点与今天的国家和公社所有权的缺点类似。同样明显的是，夺取修道院重新调配了印刷机发明后不再需要用于复制书籍和手稿的资源。

While it is difficult to measure precisely the relative productivity of Church holdings, it must have been far lower at the end of the Middle Ages than it was in the early part of that epoch. By the fourteenth century, increased emphasis upon production for the market rather than subsistence farming had led most lay lords to turn from illiterate headmen to professional managers to optimize the output of their holdings. Their incentives probably led them to quickly outstrip the output of Church properties, which in theory usually did not accrue to anyone’s private profit. No doubt some of the more worldly prince-bishops husbanded their estates in ways indistinguishable from those of the lay lords. Yet the productivity of other Church properties would surely have suffered from failures of indifferent management by a huge, far-flung institution, whose drawbacks would have been similar to the drawbacks of state and communal ownership today. It is obvious, as well, that the seizure of the monasteries rearrayed resources that were no longer needed for the reproduction of books and manuscripts after the advent of the printing press.

7. 正如我们在《大清算》中详细描述的那样，一些新教教派立即对火药革命作出了反应，通过改变教义来鼓励商业，例如取消对高利贷或有利息贷款的禁令。中世纪教会对资本主义的意识形态反对阻碍了经济增长。教会教义的主要意识形态主旨是强化封建制度，而教会作为最大的封建土地所有者，在封建制度中占有很大的份额。无论有意还是无意，教会都倾向于将自己的经济利益变成宗教美德，同时反对注定要破坏封建制度的制造业和独立商业财富的发展。例如，反对“贪婪”的禁令主要适用于商业交易，而不是封建征税，也从不适用于赎罪券的出售。教会臭名昭著地试图为商业物品确定“公平价格”，这往往会抑制教会本身不是生产者的产品和服务的经济回报。

7. As we detailed in The Great Reckoning, some of the Protestant sects immediately responded to the Gunpowder Revolution by altering their doctrines in ways that encouraged commerce, such as by lifting the injunction against usury, or lending at interest. The ideological opposition of the medieval Church to capitalism was a drag on growth. The main ideological thrust of Church teachings was to reinforce feudalism, in which the Church had a large stake, as the largest feudal landholder. Consciously, or not, the Church tended to make religious virtues of its own economic interests, while militating against the development of manufacturing and independent commercial wealth that were destined to destabilize the feudal system. Injunctions against “avarice,” for example, applied mainly to commercial transactions rather than feudal levies, and never to the sale of indulgences. The infamous attempts by the Church to fix a “just price” for items in commerce tended to suppress economic returns on those products and services where the Church itself was not a producer.

禁止“高利贷”是教会抵制商业创新的一个典型例子。银行和信贷对于大型商业企业的发展至关重要。通过限制信贷的可获得性，教会阻碍了经济增长。

The ban on “usury” was a signal example of the Church’s resistance to commercial innovation. Banking and credit were crucial to the development of larger-scale commercial enterprises. By restricting the availability of credit, the Church retarded growth.

8. 更微妙的是，新教派将《圣经》作为文本，这有助于摧毁中世纪教会的思维方式及其意识形态。两者都为教会的发展设置了障碍。中世纪晚期的文化规划鼓励人们用象征性的相似性而不是因果关系来看待世界。这种推理是短路的。它也指向远离重商主义的生活观念。用象征性的等价性来思考并不容易转化为用市场价值来思考。“三个等级代表圣母的品质。帝国的七个选帝侯代表美德；1477 年仍忠于勃艮第王朝的阿图瓦和埃诺五个城镇是五个聪明的处女……同样，鞋子代表细心和勤奋，长袜代表毅力，吊袜带代表决心，等等。” ⁶⁵正如中世纪著名历史学家约翰·胡伊津哈所言，思想被教条、僵化的符号和寓言所主导，它们将生活的各个方面以等级制的从属关系联系在一起。每一项职业、每个部分、每一种颜色、每个数字，甚至每个语法元素都与一个宏大的宗教概念体系联系在一起。

8. More subtly, the new denominations’ focus upon the Bible as a text helped demolish the medieval Church’s mode of thought as well as its ideology. Both placed obstacles in the way of growth. The cultural programming of the late Middle Ages encouraged people to see the world in terms of symbolic similitude rather than cause and effect. This short-circuited reasoning. It also pointed away from a mercantile conception of life. Thinking in terms of symbolic equivalences does not easily translate into thinking in terms of market values. “The three estates represent the qualities of the Virgin. The seven electors of the Empire signify the virtues; the five towns of Artois and Hainault, which in 1477 remained faithful to the house of Burgundy, are the five wise virgins.… In the same way shoes mean care and diligence, stockings perseverance, the garter resolution, etc.”⁶⁵ As this example quoted from the distinguished medieval historian Johan Huizinga suggests, thinking was dominated by dogma, rigid symbols, and allegory that tied together every aspect of life in terms of hierarchic subordination. Every occupation, every part, every color, every number, even every element of grammar was tied into a grand system of religious conceptions.

因此，生活中的琐碎小事不是根据因果关系来解释的，而是根据静态的象征和寓言来解释的。有时，每件事都代表着美德和恶习，代表着某种东西，这些数字又代表着其他东西，它们常常阻碍而不是澄清因果关系。为了进一步混淆问题，关系经常被任意地用数字系统捆绑在一起。七起着特别重要的作用。七种美德、七宗罪、主祷文的七种恳求、圣灵的七种礼物、七个受难时刻、七种福音和七种圣礼，“由七种动物代表，随后是七种疾病。” ⁶⁶

Thus the mundane bits and pieces of life were interpreted not in terms of their causal connections, but in terms of static symbols and allegories. Sometimes personifying virtues and vices, each thing stood for something, which stood for something else again, in ways that often blocked rather than clarified cause and effect To confuse matters further, relationships were often arbitrarily bound together in systems of numbers. Sevens played a particularly important role. There were the seven virtues, the seven deadly sins, the seven supplications of the Lord’s Prayer, the seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit, the seven moments of the passion, the seven beatitudes, and the seven sacraments, “represented by the seven animals and followed by the seven diseases.”⁶⁶

十五世纪新闻业

Fifteenth-Century Journalism

一篇 15 世纪的新闻报道，如果写出来的话，不会回答任何关于报道事实的经典问题，除非通过寓言拟人化来间接回答。请看这一篇私人日记，其中报道了 15 世纪巴黎发生的勃艮第谋杀案：

A fifteenth-century news story, if it had been written, would not have answered any of the classic questions of reporting facts, except indirectly through allegoric personification. Consider this report, in a private diary, of the Burgundian murders in fifteenth-century Paris:

随后，居住在邪恶顾问之塔的不和女神出现了，她唤醒了愤怒、疯女人、贪婪、愤怒和复仇，他们拿起各种武器，最可耻地驱逐了理性、正义、对上帝的记忆和节制。然后疯狂激怒了他们，谋杀和屠杀杀死、砍倒、处死、屠杀了他们在监狱里发现的所有人……贪婪把裙子卷进腰带里，带着她的女儿掠夺和她的儿子盗窃……后来，上述人们在女神的指引下，也就是愤怒、贪婪和复仇的指引下，穿过了巴黎所有的公共监狱，等等^。67

Then arose the goddess of Discord, who lived in the tower of Evil Counsel, and awoke Wrath, the mad woman, and Covetousness and Rage and Vengeance, and they took up arms of all sorts and cast out Reason, Justice, Remembrance of God, and Moderation most shamefully. Then Madness them enraged, and Murder and Slaughter killed, cut down, put to death, massacred all they found in the prisons.… and Covetousness tucked up her skirts into her belt with Rapine, her daughter, and Larceny, her son.… Afterward, the aforesaid people went by guidance of their goddesses, that is to say, Wrath, Covetousness, and Vengeance, who led them through all the public prisons of Paris, etc.⁶⁷

摆脱中世纪范式有助于人们以“现代”术语来思考因果关系，而不是以象征性联系和寓言拟人化的方式。

The shift away from the medieval paradigm helped prepare people to think in “modern” terms about cause and effect, rather than in terms of symbolic linkages and allegoric personification.

无需争论，中世纪晚期教会的教义和思维方式是虚伪的，因为它们倾向于与农业封建主义的需求紧密结合，同时却很少为商业留出空间，更不用说工业发展了。相反，教会作为一个主导机构，以与封建主义的要求紧密结合的方式塑造道德、文化和法律约束。正因为如此，它们不适合工业社会的需求，就像现代民族国家的道德、文化和法律约束不适合促进信息时代的商业一样。我们相信，国家将像教会一样进行革命，以促进新潜力的实现。

It is not necessary to argue that the doctrine and mode of thinking of the late-medieval Church were insincere to see that they tended to fit closely with the needs of agrarian feudalism, while allowing very little place for commerce, much less industrial development. It was rather a case of the Church as a predominant institution shaping moral, cultural, and legal constraints in ways that were closely fitted to the imperatives of feudalism. For this very reason, they were ill-suited to the needs of industrial society, just as the moral, cultural, and legal constraints of the modern nation-state are ill-suited to facilitating commerce in the Information Age. We believe that the state will be revolutionized, just as the Church was, to facilitate the realization of the new potential.

新教教义认为，唯有信仰才能到达天堂，在没有为死者祈祷的情况下，教会的救赎计划被视为一个神学问题。然而，这是适应新时代经济现实的神学。在将额外资本投入臃肿的教会官僚机构的机会成本突然上升的时候，它满足了人们显然需要一种更具成本效益的救赎之路。当没有其他出路时，人们不太介意把钱捐给教会。但当他们突然看到有机会用一百倍的资本资助一次东方的香料之旅，或者用更少的，但仍然有希望的 40% 的年利率资助国王的一个营时，他们理所当然地寻求上帝的恩典，而这才是他们自己的利益所在。

The Protestant doctrine that heaven could be attained by faith alone and without the benefit of endowed prayers for the dead was cast as a theological issue. Yet it was theology to fit the economic realities of a new age. It met the obvious need for a more cost-effective path to salvation at a time when the opportunity costs of sinking additional capital into the bloated ecclesiastical bureaucracy had suddenly risen. People had minded less giving their money to the Church when there was no other outlet for it. But when they suddenly saw the chance to make one hundred times their capital financing a spice voyage to the East, or get a lesser, but still promising sum of 40 percent per annum financing a battalion for the king, they understandably sought the grace of God where their own interests lay.

许多商人和其他平民很快就变得比他们的祖先在封建制度下富裕得多。近代商人和小制造商生活水平的急剧提高，在那些收入和生活方式随着封建制度而崩溃的人中却很不受欢迎。教会垄断的削弱和富人的超级政治权力的增强导致收入再分配急剧减少。没有直接受益于新制度的农民和城市贫民对那些受益者心怀嫉妒。赫伊津哈描述了当时普遍的态度，这可能与信息革命有着重要的相似之处：“人们普遍憎恨富人，尤其是当时人数众多的新富人。” ⁶⁸

Many merchants and other commoners soon became far richer than their forebears had been under feudalism. The sharp acceleration of living standards among the merchants and small manufacturers of the early-modern period was widely unpopular among those whose incomes and way of life were collapsing with feudalism. The weakening of the Church’s monopoly and the increased megapolitical power of the rich led to a sharp reduction in income redistribution. The peasants and urban poor who were not immediate beneficiaries of the new system were bitterly envious of those who were. Huizinga described the prevailing attitude, in what could well be an important parallel with the Information Revolution: “Hatred of rich people, especially of the new rich, who were then very numerous, is general.”⁶⁸

同样引人注目的相似之处是犯罪率的大幅上升。旧秩序的崩溃几乎总是会引发犯罪率的激增，如果不是我们在上一章探讨的封建革命的彻底无政府状态的话。在中世纪末期，随着旧社会控制系统的崩溃，犯罪率也急剧上升。用赫伊津哈的话来说，“犯罪被视为对秩序和社会的威胁。” ⁶⁹未来它可能同样具有威胁性。

An equally striking parallel arose from a tremendous surge in crime. The breakdown of the old order almost always unleashes a surge in crime, if not the outright anarchy of the feudal revolution we explored in the last chapter. At the end of the Middle Ages, crime also skyrocketed as the old systems of social control broke down. In Huizinga’s words, “[C]rime came to be regarded as a menace to order and society.”⁶⁹ It could be equally menacing in the future.

现代世界诞生于新技术、新思想和黑火药恶臭的混乱之中。火药武器和改进的航运动摇了封建制度的军事基础，而新的通讯技术则破坏了封建制度的意识形态。印刷术揭示的因素之一是教会的腐败，在一个自相矛盾地将宗教置于一切事物的中心的社会里，教会的上层阶级和普通民众早已不被重视。在一个将政治置于一切事物的中心的社会里，这种悖论与当代对政客和官僚的失望有着明显的相似之处。

The modern world was born in the confusion of new technologies, new ideas, and the stench of black powder. Gunpowder weapons and improved shipping destabilized the military foundation of feudalism, even as new communications technology undermined its ideology. Among the elements that the new technology of printing helped reveal was the corruption of the Church, whose hierarchy as well as rank and file were already held in low regard by a society that paradoxically placed religion at the center of everything. It is a paradox with an obvious contemporary parallel in the disillusionment with politicians and bureaucrats, in a society that places politics at the center of everything.

十五世纪末是一个充满幻灭、困惑、悲观和绝望的时代。与现在很像。

The end of the fifteenth century was a time of disillusion, confusion, pessimism, and despair. A time much like now.

第五章民族国家的生与死 民主与民族主义作为暴力时代的资源战略

CHAPTER 5 THE LIFE AND DEATH OF THE NATION-STATE Democracy and Nationalism as Resource Strategies in the Age of Violence

“最重要的是，战争的成功取决于是否有足够的资金来提供企业所需的一切。” ¹

—罗伯特·德·巴尔萨克， 1502 年

“Most important of all, success in war depends on having enough money to provide whatever the enterprise needs.”¹

—ROBERT DE BALSAC, 1502

历史的废墟​​​

THE RUBBLE OF HISTORY

1989 年 11 月 9 日和 10 日，电视向全世界播放了东柏林人用大锤拆除柏林墙的场景。人群中初出茅庐的企业家捡起墙的碎片，后来作为纪念品镇纸卖给了世界各地的资本家。此后几年，这些遗物生意兴隆。即使在我们写这篇文章的时候，人们仍然可以在小杂志上看到偶尔的广告，以通常高品位银矿石的价格出售东德旧混凝土碎片。我们相信那些购买柏林墙的人镇纸不急于出售。它们承载着比共产主义垮台更重要的纪念品。我们认为，自 1495 年 2 月圣乔瓦尼城墙被炸成碎片以来，柏林墙已成为最重要的历史废墟^。2

On November 9 and 10, 1989, television broadcast to the world scenes of exuberant East Berliners dismantling the Berlin Wall with sledgehammers. Fledgling entrepreneurs among the crowd picked up pieces of the wall that were later marketed to capitalists far and wide as souvenir paperweights. A brisk business in these relics was done for years thereafter. Even as we write, one can still encounter occasional ads in small magazines offering bits of old East German concrete for sale at prices ordinarily commanded by high-grade silver ore. We believe that those who bought the Berlin Wall paperweights should be in no rush to sell. They hold mementos of something bigger than the collapse of Communism. We believe that the Berlin Wall became the most important pile of historical rubble since the walls of San Giovanni were blasted to smithereens almost five centuries earlier in February 1495.²

法国国王查理八世夷平圣乔凡尼是火药革命的第一炮。正如我们之前所概述的，它标志着历史封建阶段的结束和工业主义的到来。柏林墙的倒塌标志着另一个历史分水岭，即工业时代和新信息时代的过渡。效率对权力的象征性胜利从未如此伟大。圣乔凡尼城墙倒塌，清楚地表明世界暴力的经济回报急剧上升。柏林墙的倒塌表明了不同的东西，即暴力的回报现在正在下降。这是很少有人开始认识到的事情，但它将产生巨大的后果。

The leveling of San Giovanni by the French king Charles VIII was the first blast of the Gunpowder Revolution. It marked the end of the feudal phase of history and the advent of industrialism, as we outlined earlier. The destruction of the Berlin Wall marks another historical watershed, the passage between the Industrial Age and the new Information Age. Never has there been so great a symbolic triumph of efficiency over power. When the walls of San Giovanni fell, it was a stark demonstration that the economic returns to violence in the world had risen sharply. The fall of the Berlin Wall says something different, namely that returns to violence are now falling. This is something that few have even begun to recognize, but it will have dramatic consequences.

出于本章探讨的原因，柏林墙可能比当晚柏林的人群或远处观看的数百万人更能象征整个工业民族国家时代。柏林墙的建造目的与圣乔瓦尼城墙截然不同——是为了防止里面的人逃跑，而不是为了防止外面的掠食者进入。仅凭这一事实就足以说明国家权力从 15 世纪到 20 世纪的崛起。而且，这种崛起不止一种方式。

For reasons we explore in this chapter, the Berlin Wall may prove to be far more symbolic of the whole era of the industrial nation-state than those in the crowd that night in Berlin or the millions watching from a distance understood. The Berlin Wall was built to a very different purpose than the walls of San Giovanni—to prevent people on the inside from escaping rather than to prevent predators on the outside from entering. That fact alone is a telling indicator of the rise in the power of the state from the fifteenth to the twentieth centuries. And in more ways than one.

几个世纪以来，民族国家让所有对外的围墙都变得多余和不必要。国家在最初占领的地区对强制手段的垄断程度，使这些地区内部比世界上任何主权国家都更加和平，军事上也更加强大。国家利用从基本解除武装的人口中榨取的资源来镇压小规模掠夺者。民族国家成为历史上夺取资源最成功的工具。它的成功基于其从公民身上榨取财富的卓越能力。

For centuries, the nation-state made all outward-facing walls redundant and unnecessary. The level of monopoly that the state exercised over coercion in those areas where it first took hold made them both more peaceful internally and more formidable militarily than any sovereignties the world had seen before. The state used the resources extracted from a largely disarmed population to crush small-scale predators. The nation-state became history’s most successful instrument for seizing resources. Its success was based upon its superior ability to extract the wealth of its citizens.

“MTV 不仅仅是音乐视频的供应商，也是唱片业的宣传工具。它是第一个真正的全球网络，第一个在几乎世界上每个国家提供单一节目流的网络。在此过程中，MTV 正在为其观众、儿童和年轻人创造一种共同的全球现实感。最近的研究发现，世界各地的年轻人不仅拥有共同的流行偶像和共同的品味，而且对职业的共同期望、对生活中什么是有意义的、什么是可怕的有着共同的价值观，常识告诉我们，在塑造未来方面，政治比他们自身的能力更重要。” ³

—JIM TAYLOR和WATTS WACKER ，《500 年的三角洲：之后会发生什么？接下来会发生什么？》

“MTV is more than a purveyor of music videos—and a promotional tool of the recording industry. It’s the first truly global network, the first network to deliver a single stream of programming in virtually every country in the world. In the process, MTV is creating a single sense of shared global reality for its viewers, children and young adults. Recent research has found that young people around the planet more and more share not just common pop icons and common tastes, but common expectations for their careers, common sets of values about what is meaningful in life and what there is to be afraid of, a common sense that politics is less important than their own abilities in shaping their futures.”³

—JIM TAYLOR AND WATTS WACKER, The 500-Year Delta: What Happens After What Comes Next

“要么爱它，要么离开它”（除非你很有钱）

“Love It or Leave It” (Unless You Are Rich)

在从民族国家向信息时代新主权的过渡完成之前，西方最大、最强大的民族国家的许多居民，就像 1989 年东柏林的居民一样，正在密谋寻找出路。对于二战前或冷战初期成年的几代人来说，跨越国界是一件痛苦的事。但对于从更全球化的视角来定位自己的新一代人来说，放弃自己的出生国并不是一个不可想象的决定，而对于更受民族国家意识形态影响的上一代人来说则是一个不可想象的决定。吉姆·泰勒和瓦茨·瓦克报告了一项对五大洲 25,000 名中产阶级高中生进行的大规模调查的有趣结果。在纽约消费者研究公司 Brainwaves Group 在 1995-96 学年进行的抽样调查中，十分之九的学生同意“我的生活由我自己决定”。更引人注目的是，“几乎一半的青少年说他们准备离开自己的出生国，以追寻自己的目标。” ⁴也许是因为他了解 MTV 一代的态度，作为第一位通过 MTV 竞选的总统候选人，比尔·克林顿一直试图让美国人更难“离开自己的出生国，以追寻自己的目标”。1995 年，就在高中生宣布寻求独立的同时，美国总统提议征收退出税，即“资本的柏林墙”，要求富有的美国人支付一大笔赎金，才能带着部分钱逃离。

Before the transition from the nation-state to the new sovereignties of the Information Age is complete, many residents of the largest and most powerfull Western nation-states, like their counterparts in East Berlin in 1989, will be plotting to find their way out. For the generations that came of age before World War II, or early in the Cold War, moving across borders is traumatic. But for new generations, who draw their bearings from a more global perspective, abandoning the country of their birth is not the unthinkable decision it would be for older persons who are more deeply inculcated with the ideology of the nation-state. Jim Taylor and Watts Wacker report the intriguing results of a mass survey of 25,000 middle-class high school students on five continents. In a sampling conducted during the 1995-96 school year by Brainwaves Group, a New York consumer-research firm, nine of ten students agreed that “it’s up to me to get what I want of life.” More strikingly, “almost half the teens said they expected to leave the country of their birth in pursuit of their goals.”⁴ Perhaps because he is tuned in to the attitudes of the MTV generation, as the first presidential candidate to campaign on MTV, Bill Clinton has sought to make it more difficult for Americans to “leave the country of their birth in pursuit of their goals.” In 1995, at about the same time that the high school students were declaring their intentions to seek independence, the President of the United States proposed the enactment of an exit tax, a “Berlin Wall for Capital,” that would require wealthy Americans to pay a substantial ransom to escape with even part of their money.

克林顿的赎金不仅让人想起了东德政府将公民视为资产的政策，也让人想起了衰落中的罗马帝国为巩固财政地位而采取的日益严厉的措施。《剑桥古代史》中的这段话讲述了这个故事。

Clinton’s ransom is not only reminiscent of the late East German state’s policy of treating its citizens as assets; it also calls to mind the increasingly draconian measures taken to shore up the fiscal position of the Roman Empire in decline. This passage from The Cambridge Ancient History tells the story.

于是，国家开始疯狂地压榨人民，直到最后一滴。由于经济资源不足，强者为了获得主要份额而进行斗争，其暴力和不择手段与当权者的出身相符，军队也习惯于掠夺。法律的严酷性在人民身上得以充分体现。士兵们充当法警或秘密警察，在全国各地巡逻。受害最深的当然是有产阶级。他们的财产相对容易被夺走，在紧急情况下，他们是最容易被勒索的阶级^。5

Thus began the fierce endeavor of the State to squeeze the population to the last drop. Since economic resources fell short of what was needed, the strong fought to secure the chief share for themselves with a violence and unscrupulousness well in keeping with the origin of those in power and with a soldiery accustomed to plunder. The full rigour of the law was let loose on the population. Soldiers acted as bailiffs or wandered as secret police through the land. Those who suffered most were, of course, the propertied class. It was relatively easy to lay hands on their property, and in an emergency, they were the class from whom something could be extorted most frequently and quickly.⁵

当失败的制度有能力这样做时，它们通常会对那些试图逃跑的人施加惩罚。我们再次引用《剑桥古代史》： “如果有产阶级埋藏他们的钱财，或牺牲三分之二的财产以逃避行政长​​官的统治，或甚至放弃他们的全部财产以摆脱土地租金，而无产阶级逃跑，国家就会通过增加压力来回应。”

When failing systems have the power to do so, they often impose penal burdens upon those seeking to escape. Again, we quote The Cambridge Ancient History: “If the propertied class buried their money, or sacrificed two-thirds of their estate to escape from a magistracy, or went so far as to give up their whole property in order to get free of the domains rent, and the non-propertied class ran away, the State replied by increasing the pressure.”

在你制定计划时，这一点值得牢记。过去国家制度的衰落很少是一个礼貌、有序的过程。我们在第 2 章中提到了罗马收税员的恶劣习惯。罗马帝国崩溃后，西欧大量出现农业荒废，这只反映了一个更大问题的一小部分。事实上，在高卢以及包括现在的卢森堡和德国的边境地区，征收的税款往往相对较轻。在罗马最肥沃的地区埃及，由于灌溉，农业生产率更高，但业主的遗弃是一个更大的问题。是否试图逃跑，即拉丁语中的“终极避难所”，成为几乎所有有财产的人最头疼的问题。记录显示，“在埃及，人们过去向神谕提出的常见问题有三种标准类型：‘我要成为乞丐吗？’‘我要逃跑吗？’”以及‘我的航班会停飞吗？’” ⁶

This is worth remembering as you plan ahead. The twilight of state systems in the past has seldom been a polite, orderly process. We mentioned the nasty habits of Roman tax collectors in Chapter 2. The large numbers of agri deserti, or abandoned farms, in Western Europe after the collapse of the Roman Empire reflected only a small part of a wider problem. In fact, exactions tended to be relatively mild in Gaul, and in the frontier areas that comprise current-day Luxembourg and Germany. In Rome’s most fertile region, Egypt, where farming was more productive because of irrigation, desertion by owners was an even bigger problem. The question of whether to attempt escape, the ultimum refugium, as it was known in Latin, became the overriding quandary of almost everyone with property. Records show that “among the common questions which used to be put to an oracle in Egypt three standard types were: ‘Am I to become a beggar?’ ‘Shall I take to flight?’ and ‘Is my flight to be stopped?’ ”⁶

克林顿的提议是肯定的。这只是逃亡障碍的早期版本，随着国家财政资源的减少，这一障碍可能会变得更加繁重。当然，美国第一个版本的逃亡障碍比埃里希·昂纳克的混凝土和铁丝网要温和得多。它还涉及更大的价格敏感性，负担只落在应税财产超过 60 万美元的“亿万富翁”身上。尽管如此，它的理由与昂纳克在为已故德意志民主共和国最著名的公共工程项目辩护时提出的理由类似。昂纳克声称，东德政府对潜在难民进行了大规模投资。他指出，允许他们自由离开将给国家带来经济劣势，这需要他们在东德做出努力。

Clinton’s proposal says yes. It is an early version of an obstacle to escape that is likely to grow more onerous as the fiscal resources of the nation-state slip away. Of course, the first U.S. version of an exit barrier is more benign than Erich Honecker’s concrete and barbed wire. It also involves greater price sensitivity, with the burden falling only on “billionaires” with taxable estates above $600,000. Nonetheless, it was justified with similar arguments to those once propounded by Honecker in defense of the late German Democratic Republic’s most famous public works project. Honecker claimed that the East German state had a substantial investment in would-be refugees. He pointed out that allowing them to leave freely would create an economic disadvantage for the state, which required their efforts in East Germany.

如果你接受人民是或应该是国家资产的前提，昂纳克的围墙是有道理的。没有围墙的柏林墙对共产党来说是一个漏洞，就像逃避美国税收管辖权对克林顿的国税局来说是一个漏洞一样。克林顿关于逃避亿万富翁的论点，除了表明政治家的通常情况下，对数字完整性的漠视与昂纳克的类似，但逻辑性略差一些，因为美国政府实际上并没有对可能寻求出走的富裕公民进行大量经济投资。问题不在于他们是否接受过国家资助的教育，是否想溜走并在其他地方从事法律工作。绝大多数需要缴纳出境税的人都是通过自己的努力创造财富的，尽管美国政府不关心他们，而不是因为他们。

If you accept the premise that people are or ought to be assets of the state, Honecker’s wall made sense. Berlin without a wall was a loophole to the Communists, just as escape from U.S. tax jurisdiction was a loophole to Clinton’s IRS. Clinton’s arguments about escaping billionaires, aside from showing a politician’s usual disregard for the integrity of numbers, were similar in kind to Honecker’s, but somewhat less logical because the U.S. government, in fact, does not have a large economic investment in wealthy citizens who might seek to lee. It is not a question of their having been educated at state expense and wanting to slip away and practice law somewhere else. The overwhelming majority of those to whom the exit tax would apply have created their wealth by their own efforts and in spite of, not because of, the U.S. government.

1% 的纳税人支付了美国总所得税的 30.2%（1995 年），这并不是富人未能偿还政府对他们的教育或经济繁荣进行的任何真正投资的问题。恰恰相反。支付大部分账单的人支付的费用远远超过他们获得的任何福利的价值。美国 1% 的纳税人年均纳税额超过 125,000 美元，税收负担远远超过他们现在的认识。假设他们能在四十年内获得每个人超额纳税的 10% 回报，那么每年每超额纳税 5,000 美元就会减少他们的净资产 220 万美元。以 20% 的回报率计算，每超额纳税 5,000 美元就会减少他们的净资产 4,400 万美元。

With the top 1 percent of taxpayers paying 30.2 percent of the total income tax in the United States (1995), it is not a question of the rich failing to repay any genuine investment the state may have made in their education or economic prosperity. To the contrary. Those who pay most of the bills pay vastly more than the value of any benefits they receive. With an average annual tax payment exceeding $125,000, taxes cost the top 1 percent of American taxpayers far more than they now realize. Assuming they could earn even a 10 percent return on the excess tax paid by each over a forty-year period, each $5,000 of annual excess tax payment reduced their net worth by $2.2 million. At a 20 percent rate of return, each $5,000 of excess tax reduces net worth by $44 million.

随着新千年的临近，信息时代新的大政治条件将使人们越来越清楚地认识到，从工业时代继承下来的民族国家是一个掠夺性的机构。随着每一年的过去，它看起来都不再是繁荣的福音，而更像是一个障碍，个人会想逃离它。绝望的政府不愿允许这种逃避。西方福利国家的稳定甚至生存取决于它们能否继续从世界总产出中榨取很大一部分，然后再分配给经合组织国家中的一小部分选民。这就要求对目前富裕国家最有生产力的公民征收的税款要按超垄断税率定价，比政府提供的服务的实际成本高出数百甚至数千倍。

As the millennium approaches, the new megapolitical conditions of the Information Age will make it increasingly obvious that the nation-state inherited from the industrial era is a predatory institution. With each year that passes, it will seem less a boon to prosperity and more an obstacle, one from which the individual will want an escape. It is an escape that desperate governments will be loath to allow. The stability and even the survival of Western welfare states depends upon their ability to continue extracting a huge fraction of the world’s total output for redistribution to a subset of voters in the OECD countries. This requires that the taxes imposed upon the most productive citizens of the currently rich countries be priced at supermonopoly rates, hundreds or even thousands of times higher than the actual cost of the services that governments provide in return.

民族国家的生与死​​​​​​

THE LIFE AND DEATH OF THE NATION-STATE

柏林墙的倒塌不仅仅是共产主义灭亡的明显象征。这是整个民族国家世界体系的失败，也是效率和市场的胜利。历史背后的力量支点已经转移。我们认为，1989 年柏林墙的倒塌标志着民族国家时代的到来，这是历史上一个特殊的两百年阶段，始于法国大革命。国家已经存在了六千年。但在十九世纪之前，它们只占世界上的主权国家所占的很小一部分。他们的崛起始于革命，也以革命告终。1789 年的重大事件使欧洲走上了真正国家政府的道路。1989 年的重大事件标志着共产主义的消亡，以及市场力量对集权的控制。这两场革命相隔整整两百年，定义了民族国家在大国体系中占主导地位的时代。大国反过来主宰了世界，甚至在最偏远的部落聚居地传播或强加国家制度。

The fall of the Berlin Wall was more than just a visible symbol of the death of Communism. It was a defeat for the entire world system of nation-states and a triumph of efficiency and markets. The fulcrum of power underlying history has shifted. We believe that the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 culminates the era of the nation-state, a peculiar two-hundred-year phase in history that began with the French Revolution. States have existed for six thousand years. But before the nineteenth century, they accounted for only a small fraction of the world’s sovereignties. Their ascendancy began and ended in revolution. The great events of 1789 launched Europe on a course toward truly national governments. The great events of 1989 marked the death of Communism and an assertion of control by market forces over massed power. Those two revolutions, exactly two hundred years apart, define the era in which the nation-state predominated in the Great Power system. The Great Powers, in turn, dominated the world, spreading or imposing state systems on even the most remote tribal enclave.

国家作为世界上组织暴力的主要工具的胜利与意识形态无关。这是暴力的隐性逻辑所必然导致的。正如我们所说，这是一个超级政治事件，它不是由理论家和政治家的意愿，甚至不是由将军的操纵决定的，而是由暴力的隐性杠杆决定的，它推动着历史，就像阿基米德曾经梦想的那样推动着世界。

The triumph of the state as the principal vehicle for organizing violence in the world was not a matter of ideology. It was necessitated by the hidden logic of violence. It was, as we like to say, a megapolitical event, determined not so much by the wishes of theorists and statesmen, or even by the maneuvering of generals, as by the hidden leverage of violence, which moved history in the way that Archimedes once dreamt of moving the world.

在过去两百年的现代时期，国家一直是常态。但在更长的历史长河中，国家却很少见。它们始终依赖非凡的超级政治条件才能生存。在现代之前，大多数国家都是“东方专制”，即沙漠中的农业社会，依靠对灌溉系统的控制才能生存。即使是罗马帝国，通过对埃及和北非的控制，也间接地是一个水力社会。但还不足以生存下去。罗马和大多数前现代国家一样，最终缺乏强迫人们遵守暴力垄断的能力，而这种暴力垄断是通过饿死人民的能力提供的。非洲以外的罗马国家无法通过拒绝不服从的人使用灌溉系统来切断种植农作物的水源。这种水力系统比古代经济中任何其他超级政治结构都更能为暴力提供杠杆。在这些社会中，控制水的人都可以榨取几乎与现代民族国家吸收的总产出百分比相当的战利品^。7

States have been the norm for the past two hundred years of the modern period. But in the longer sweep of history, states have been rare. They have always depended upon extraordinary megapolitical conditions for their viability. Prior to the modern period, most states were “Oriental despotisms,” agricultural societies in deserts dependent upon control of irrigation systems for their survival. Even the Roman Empire, through its control of Egypt and North Africa, was indirectly a hydraulic society. But not enough of one to survive. Rome, like most premodern states, ultimately lacked the capacity to compel adherence to the monopoly of violence that the ability to starve people provides. The Roman state outside of Africa could not cut off water for growing crops by denying unsubmissive people access to the irrigation system. Such hydraulic systems supplied more leverage to violence than any other megapolitical configuration in the ancient economy. Whoever controlled the water in these societies could extract spoils at a level almost comparable to the percentage of total output absorbed by modern nation-states.⁷

规模大于效率

Magnitude over Efficiency

火药使国家能够更容易地在稻田和干旱河谷的范围之外扩张。火药武器的性质和工业经济的特点在战争中创造了巨大的规模优势。这导致了暴力的高回报和不断上升的回报。正如历史学家查尔斯·蒂利所说，“拥有最大强制手段的国家往往赢得战争；效率（产出与投入的比率）排在效力（总产出）之后。” ⁸由于政府大多是大规模组织的，即使是少数幸存下来的小主权国家，如摩纳哥或安道尔，也需要大国的承认才能确保其独立。只有大政府才能在战争中取得胜利。拥有更强的资源支配能力，可以在战场上展开竞争。

Gunpowder enabled states to expand more easily outside the confines of rice paddies and arid river valleys. The nature of gunpowder weapons and the character of the industrial economy created great advantages of scale in warfare. This led to high and rising returns to violence. As historian Charles Tilly put it, “[S]tates having the largest coercive means tended to win wars; efficiency (the ratio of output to input) came second to effectiveness (total output).”⁸ With governments mostly organized on a large scale, even the few small sovereignties that survived, like Monaco or Andorra, needed the recognition of the larger states to ensure their independence. Only big governments with ever-greater command of resources could compete on the battlefield.

尚未解答的大问题

The Great Unanswered Question

这给我们带来了现代史上未解的一大谜团：为什么大国体系结束后的冷战，最终的竞争者是共产主义独裁政权，而民主福利国家却成为其竞争者。这个问题很少得到研究，以至于当美国国务院分析师弗朗西斯·福山在柏林墙倒塌后宣布“历史的终结”时，许多人都觉得这是有道理的。他的作品引发了热情的读者，他们把很多事情视为理所当然。显然，作者和其他许多人都没有费心去问一个基本问题：国家社会主义和福利国家民主的哪些共同特征使它们成为世界主宰的最后竞争者？

This brings us to one of the great unanswered puzzles of modern history: why the Cold War that came at the conclusion of the Great Power system pitted as its final contenders Communist dictatorships against democratic welfare states. This issue has been so little examined that it actually seemed plausible to many when a State Department analyst, Francis Fukuyama, proclaimed “the end of history” after the Berlin Wall fell. The enthusiastic audience his work elicited took too much for granted. Apparently neither the author nor many others had bothered to ask a fundamental question: What common characteristics of state socialism and welfare-state democracies led them to be the final contenders for world domination?

这是一个重要的问题。毕竟，在过去的五个世纪里，数十种相互竞争的主权制度来来去去，包括绝对君主制、部落飞地、主教公爵制、教皇直接统治、苏丹国、城邦和再洗礼派殖民地。今天，大多数人会惊讶地发现，一家拥有自己武装部队的医院管理公司可以统治一个国家几个世纪。然而，类似的事情发生了。1228 年后三百年间，耶路撒冷圣玛丽医院的条顿骑士团（后来与利沃尼亚宝剑骑士团联合）统治着东普鲁士和东欧的各个领土，包括立陶宛和波兰的部分地区。随后发生了火药革命。几十年内，条顿骑士团被驱逐出所有领土，他们的大团长在军事上的重要性不亚于国际象棋冠军。为什么？为什么在工业时代末期争夺世界权力的伟大斗争中，大众民主国家与国家社会主义制度并肩作战，而其他许多主权体系却变得无足轻重？

This is an important issue. After all, dozens of contending systems of sovereignty have come and gone in the past five centuries, including absolute monarchies, tribal enclaves, prince-bishoprics, direct rule by the pope, sultanates, city-states, and Anabaptist colonies. Today, most people would be surprised to learn that a hospital management company, with its own armed forces, could rule a country for centuries. Yet something very like that happened. For three hundred years after 1228, the Teutonic Knights of St. Mary’s Hospital at Jerusalem, later united with the Knights of the Sword of Livonia, ruled East Prussia and various territories in Eastern Europe, including parts of Lithuania and Poland. Then came the Gunpowder Revolution. Within decades, the Teutonic Knights were expelled as sovereigns of all their territories and their Grand Master was of no more military importance than a chess champion. Why? Why did so many other systems of sovereignty dwindle to insignificance while the great struggle for world power at the end of the Industrial Age saw mass democracies lined up against state socialist systems?

畅通无阻的控制

Unimpeded Control

我们的大政治理论指出了答案。这就像问相扑选手为何往往很胖。答案是，一个瘦削的相扑选手，无论他的力量与体重之比多么惊人，都无法与另一个身材高大的相扑选手竞争。正如蒂利所言，重要的问题是“效力（总产出）”，而不是“效率（产出与投入之比）”。在一个日益暴力的世界里，在五个世纪的竞争中占主导地位的制度必然是那些能够最大程度地获取大规模战争所需资源的制度。

Our theory of megapolitics points to the answer. It is rather like asking why sumo wrestlers tend to be fat. The answer is that a lean sumo wrestler, however impressive his ratio of strength to weight, cannot compete with another wrestler who is gigantic. As Tilly suggests, the important issue was “effectiveness (total output),” not “efficiency (the ratio of output to input).” In an increasingly violent world, the systems that predominated through five centuries of competition were necessarily those that facilitated the greatest access to resources needed to make war on a large scale.

这是如何实现的？

How did this work?

就共产主义而言，答案显而易见。在共产主义统治下，那些控制国家的人几乎控制了一切。如果你是冷战期间的苏联公民，克格勃可能会拿走你的牙刷，如果他们认为这样做对他们的目的有用的话。他们可能会拿走你的牙齿。根据自 1992 年公开前苏联档案以来变得更加可信的可靠估计，秘密警察和前苏联政府的其他特工在 74 年的统治期间夺走了 5000 万人的生命。国家社会主义制度能够动员其境内存在的任何东西为其军队服务，几乎没有任何生活在那里的人会对此提出异议。

In the case of Communism, the answer is obvious. Under Communism, those who controlled the state controlled almost everything. If you had been a citizen of the Soviet Union during the Cold War, the KGB could have taken your toothbrush if they had thought it useful for their purposes to do so. They could have taken your teeth. According to credible estimates that have become more credible since the opening of former Soviet archives in 1992, secret police and other agents of the late Soviet state took the lives of 50 million persons in seventy-four years of rule. The state socialist system was in a position to mobilize anything that existed within its boundaries for its military, with little likelihood that anyone living there would argue.

就西方民主国家而言，情况就不那么明显了，部分原因是我们习惯于将民主与共产主义形成鲜明对比。从工业时代的角度来看，这两个制度确实是截然相反的。但从信息时代的角度来看，这两个制度的共同点比你想象的要多。两者都促进了政府对资源的不受阻碍的控制。不同之处在于，民主福利国家比国家社会主义制度将更多的资源置于国家手中。

In the case of Western democracies, the story is less obvious, partly because we are accustomed to think of democracy in stark contrast to Communism. In terms of the Industrial Age, the two systems were indeed great opposites. But seen from the perspective of the Information Age, the two systems had more in common than you might suspect. Both facilitated unimpeded control of resources by government. The difference was that the democratic welfare state placed even greater resources in the hands of the state than the state socialist systems.

这是一个罕见现象的典型例子，即少即是多。国家社会主义制度建立在国家拥有一切的原则之上。相比之下，民主福利国家的要求更为温和，从而采用更优厚的激励措施来动员更多的产出。西方政府一开始并不要求拥有一切，而是允许个人拥有财产并积累财富。然后，在财富积累之后，西方民族国家对其中很大一部分征税。高额的财产税、所得税和遗产税为民主福利国家提供了与国家社会主义制度相比数量惊人的资源。

This is a clear-cut example of a rare phenomenon, less being more. The state socialist system was predicated upon the doctrine that the state owned everything. The democratic welfare state, by contrast, made more modest claims, and thereby employed superior incentives to mobilize greater output. Instead of laying claim to everything in the beginning, governments in the West allowed individuals to own property and accumulate wealth. Then, after the wealth had been accumulated, the Western nation-states taxed a large fraction of it away. Property taxes, income taxes, and estate taxes at high levels furnished the democratic welfare state with prodigious quantities of resources compared to those available through the state socialist systems.

效率低下，至关重要

Inefficiency, Where It Counted

与共产主义相比，福利国家确实是一种效率高得多的制度。但与其他积累财富的制度相比，比如殖民地香港这样的真正自由放任的飞地，福利国家效率低下。同样，少即是多。正是这种低效率使得福利国家在工业时代的大政治条件下占据了至高无上的地位。

Compared to Communism, the welfare state was indeed a far more efficient system. But compared to other systems for accumulating wealth, such as a genuine laissez-faire enclave like colonial Hong Kong, the welfare state was inefficient. Again, less was more. It was precisely this inefficiency that made the welfare state supreme during the megapolitical conditions of the Industrial Age.

当你理解了原因，你就更接近于认识到柏林墙倒塌和共产主义灭亡的真正意义。它远非像人们普遍认为的那样，保证民主福利国家将是一个胜利的制度，更像是看到一个兄弟般的孪生兄弟已经因年老而去世。消灭共产主义的同一场超级政治革命也可能破坏和摧毁我们在二十世纪所熟知的民主福利国家。

When you come to understand why, you are much closer to recognizing what the fall of the Berlin Wall and the death of Communism really mean. Far from assuring that the democratic welfare state will be a triumphant system, as has been widely assumed, it was more like seeing that a fraternal twin has died of old age. The same megapolitical revolution that killed Communism is also likely to undermine and destroy democratic welfare states as we have known them in the twentieth century.

谁控制政府？​​

WHO CONTROLS GOVERNMENT?

这一非传统结论的关键在于认识到民主政府的控制权在何处。这个问题并不像看上去那么简单。在现代，谁控制政府的问题几乎总是被当作一个政治问题来提出。这个问题有许多答案，但几乎一致地涉及确定在特定时刻控制特定国家的政党、团体或派系。你听说过由资本家控制的政府。由劳工控制的政府。由天主教徒和伊斯兰原教旨主义者控制的政府。由部落和种族群体控制的政府；由胡图族控制的政府和由白人控制的政府。你还听说过由职业群体（如律师或银行家）控制的政府。你听说过由农村利益集团、大城市机器和居住在郊区的人控制的政府。你肯定听说过由政党、民主党、保守党、基督教民主党、自由党、激进党、共和党和社会党控制的政府。

The key to this unorthodox conclusion lies in recognizing where the control of democratic government is lodged. It is an issue that is not as simple as it may seem. In the modern era, the question of who controls the government has almost always been asked as a political question. It has had many answers, but almost uniformly these involved identifying the political party, group, or faction that dominated the control of a particular state at a particular moment. You have heard of governments controlled by capitalists. Governments controlled by labor. Governments controlled by Catholics, and by Islamic fundamentalists. Governments controlled by tribal and racial groups; governments controlled by Hutus and governments by whites. You have also heard of governments controlled by occupational groups, such as lawyers or bankers. You have heard of governments controlled by rural interests, by big-city machines and by people living in the suburbs. And you have certainly heard of governments controlled by political parties, by Democrats, Conservatives, Christian Democrats, Liberals, Radicals, Republicans, and Socialists.

但你可能没有听说过政府受顾客控制。经济史学家弗雷德里克·莱恩（Frederic Lane）在前文讨论暴力的经济后果的一些清晰文章中，为理解政府控制的新方式奠定了基础。莱恩将政府视为出售保护的经济单位，这促使他从经济而非政治的角度分析政府控制。根据这种观点，政府控制有三种基本选择，每种选择都包含一套根本不同的激励机制：业主、雇员和顾客。

But you probably have not heard much about a government controlled by its customers. Economic historian Frederic Lane laid the basis for a new way of understanding, where the control of government lies in some of his lucid essays on the economic consequences of violence discussed earlier. Thinking about government as an economic unit that sells protection led Lane to analyze the control of government in economic rather than political terms. In this view, there are three basic alternatives in the control of government, each of which entails a fundamentally different set of incentives: proprietors, employees, and customers.

业主

Proprietors

在极少数情况下，即使在今天，政府有时也由业主控制，通常是世袭的领导人，他实际上拥有这个国家。例如，文莱苏丹将文莱政府视为业主。这在中世纪的领主中更为常见，他们将封地视为业主，以优化收入。

In rare cases, even today, governments are sometimes controlled by a proprietor, usually a hereditary leader who for all intents and purposes owns the country. For example, the Sultan of Brunei treats the government of Brunei somewhat like a proprietorship. This was more common among lords of the Middle Ages, who treated their fiefs as proprietorships to optimize their incomes.

Lane 对“生产企业所有者”的激励机制进行了如下描述：

Lane described the incentives of “the owners of the production-producing enterprise” as follows:

追求利润最大化的利益会促使他在维持价格的同时，努力降低成本。他会像英国国王亨利七世或法国国王路易十一一样，使用廉价的诡计，至少是尽可能廉价的手段，来确立自己的合法性，维持国内秩序，分散邻国王子的注意力，以便降低自己的军事开支。通过降低成本，或通过巩固垄断而增加的税收，或通过两者的结合，他积累了盈余……” ⁹

An interest in maximizing profits would lead him, while maintaining prices, to try to reduce his costs. He would, like Henry VII of England or Louis XI of France, use inexpensive wiles, at least as inexpensive devices as possible, to affirm his legitimacy, to maintain domestic order, and to distract neighboring princes so that his own military expenses would be low. From lowered costs, or from the increased exactions made possible by the firmness of his monopoly, or from a combination, he accumulated a surplus.…”⁹

受业主控制的政府有强烈的动机降低在特定地区提供保护或垄断暴力的成本。但只要他们的统治是稳固的，他们就没有多少动机将向客户收取的价格（税收）降低到使收入最大化的水平以下。垄断者收取的价格越高，实际成本越低，他获得的利润就越大。受业主控制的政府的理想财政政策是实现巨额盈余。当政府能够保持高收入但削减成本时，这将对资源的使用产生巨大影响。劳动力和其他有价值的投入，否则将被浪费在提供不必要的昂贵保护上，而现在可用于投资和其他目的。君主通过降低成本提高利润的程度越高，释放的资源就越多。当这些资源用于投资时，它们会刺激增长。但即使它们被用于炫耀性消费，它们也有助于创造和滋养新市场，如果资源被浪费在提供低效的“保护”上，这些市场就不会存在。

Governments controlled by proprietors have strong incentives to reduce the costs of providing protection or monopolizing violence in a given area. But so long as their rule is secure, they have little incentive to reduce the price (tax) they charge their customers below the rate that optimizes revenues. The higher the price a monopolist can charge, and the lower his actual costs, the greater the profit he will make. The ideal fiscal policy for a government controlled by its proprietors would be a huge surplus. When governments can keep their revenues high but cut their costs, this has a large impact on the use of resources. Labor and other valuable inputs that would otherwise be wasted providing unnecessarily expensive protection become available instead for investment and other purposes. The higher the monarch can raise his profit by lowering costs, the more resources are freed. When these resources are used for investment, they provide a stimulus for growth. But even if they are used for conspicuous consumption, they help create and feed new markets that otherwise would not exist if the resources had been wasted to produce inefficient “protection.”

雇员

Employees

很容易描述由雇员控制的政府所具有的激励机制。在其他雇员控制的组织中，这些激励机制也类似。首先，雇员控制的组织倾向于支持任何增加就业的政策，反对减少就业的措施。正如莱恩所说：“当雇员作为一个整体进行控制时，他们几乎没有兴趣将保护所征收的金额降到最低，也没有兴趣将劳动力成本（即他们自己的工资）所代表的大部分成本降到最低。最大化规模也更符合他们的口味。” ¹⁰由雇员控制的政府很少有动力降低政府成本或向客户收取的价格。然而，在以反对提高税收的形式施加强烈价格阻力的情况下，由雇员控制的政府员工更有可能让收入低于支出，而不是削减支出。换句话说，他们的激励机制意味着他们可能倾向于长期赤字，而由业主控制的政府则不会这样做。

It is easy to characterize the incentives that prevail for governments controlled by their employees. They would be similar incentives in other employee-controlled organizations. First and foremost, employee-run organizations tend to favor any policy that increases employment and oppose measures which reduce jobs. As Lane put it, “When employees as a whole controlled, they had little interest in minimizing the amounts exacted for protection and none in minimizing that large part of costs represented by labor costs, by their own salaries. Maximizing size was more to their taste also.”¹⁰ A government controlled by its employees would seldom have incentives to either reduce the costs of government or the price charged to their customers. However, where conditions impose strong price resistance, in the form of opposition to higher taxes, governments controlled by employees would be more likely to let their revenues fall below their outlays than to cut their outlays. In other words, their incentives imply that they may be inclined toward chronic deficits, as governments controlled by proprietors would not be.

顾客

Customers

有没有政府被客户控制的例子？有。莱恩从中世纪威尼斯等商业共和国的例子启发，从经济角度分析了政府的控制。当时，一群需要保护的批发商有效地控制了政府几个世纪。他们是政府提供的保护服务的真正客户，而不是业主。他们为服务付费。他们并不寻求从对政府暴力垄断的控制中获利。如果有人想这样做，其他客户会长期阻止他们这样做。其他政府被客户控制的例子包括民主国家和有限选举权的共和国，例如古代民主国家或建国时期的美国共和国。当时，只有那些为政府付费的人，约占人口的 10%，才被允许投票。

Are there examples of governments controlled by their customers? Yes. Lane was inspired to analyze the control of government in economic terms by the example of the medieval merchant republics, like Venice. There a group of wholesale merchants who required protection effectively controlled the government for centuries. They were genuinely customers for the protection service government provided, not proprietors. They paid for the service. They did not seek to profit from their control of government’s monopoly of violence. If some did, they were prevented from doing so by the other customers for long periods of time. Other examples of governments controlled by their customers include democracies and republics with limited franchise, such as the ancient democracies, or the American republic in its founding period. At that time, only those who paid for the government, about 10 percent of the population, were allowed to vote.

受客户控制的政府，就像业主控制的政府一样，有动机尽可能降低运营成本。但与受业主或雇员控制的政府不同，实际上受客户控制的政府有动机压低其收取的价格。在客户主导的地方，政府精简且通常不引人注目，运营成本低，就业人数少，税收低。受客户控制的政府设定税率不是为了优化政府可以收取的金额，而是为了优化客户可以保留的金额。与竞争市场中的典型企业一样，即使是受客户控制的垄断企业也会被迫走向效率。它不能以税收的形式收取超过成本超过微薄利润的价格。

Governments controlled by their customers, like those of proprietors, have incentives to reduce their operating costs as far as possible. But unlike governments controlled by either proprietors or employees, governments actually controlled by their customers have incentives to hold down the prices they charge. Where customers rule, governments are lean and generally unobtrusive, with low operating costs, minimal employment, and low taxes. A government controlled by its customers sets tax rates not to optimize the amount the government can collect but rather to optimize the amount that the customers can retain. Like typical enterprises in competitive markets, even a monopoly controlled by its customers would be compelled to move toward efficiency. It would not be able to charge a price, in the form of taxes, that exceeded costs by more than a bare margin.

民主的作用：选民作为雇员和顾客​​​

THE ROLE OF DEMOCRACY: VOTERS AS EMPLOYEES AND CUSTOMERS

莱恩以传统方式看待民主，认为民主使使用暴力和制造暴力的企业“日益受到其客户的控制”。11^这当然是政治正确的结论。但事实真是如此吗？我们认为不是。仔细看看现代民主是如何运作的。

Lane treats democracy in the conventional way in assuming that it brings violence-using and violence-producing enterprises “increasingly under the control of their customers.”¹¹ This is certainly the politically correct conclusion. But is it true? We think not. Look closely at how modern democracies function.

首先，它们几乎没有那些竞争性行业的特点，因为这些行业的贸易条件显然由客户控制。首先，民主政府通常只将其总支出的一小部分用于保护服务，而保护服务是其核心活动。例如，在美国，州和地方政府仅将其总支出的 3.5% 用于提供警察、法院和监狱。加上军费开支，用于保护的收入比例仍然只有 10% 左右。另一个表明大众民主不受客户控制的迹象是，当代继承自工业时代的政治文化认为，如果关键问题的政策实际上是由付钱的人的利益决定的，那将是令人愤慨的。想象一下，如果美国总统或英国首相提议允许支付大部分税款的公民群体决定哪些政府项目应该继续，哪些雇员群体应该被解雇，会引起多大的骚动。这将严重违背人们对政府运作方式的期望，而允许政府雇员决定应该提高谁的税收则不会。

First of all, they have few characteristics of those competitive industries where the terms of trade are clearly controlled by their customers. For one thing, democratic governments typically spend only a bare fraction of their total outlays on the service of protection, which is their core activity. In the United States, for example, state and local governments spend just 3.5 percent of their total outlays on the provision of police, as well as courts and prisons. Add military spending, and the fraction of revenues devoted to protection is still only about 10 percent. Another revealing hint that mass democracy is not controlled by its customers is the fact that contemporary political culture, inherited from the Industrial Age, would consider it outrageous if policies on crucial issues were actually informed by the interests of the people who pay the bills. Imagine the uproar if a U.S. president or a British prime minister proposed to allow the group of citizens who pay the majority of the taxes to determine which programs of government should continue and which groups of employees should be fired. This would deeply offend expectations of how government should operate, in a way that allowing government employees to determine whose taxes should be raised would not.

然而，如果你仔细想想，当顾客真正处于主导地位时，他们得不到自己想要的东西，这简直是太离谱了。如果你去商店买家具，销售人员收了你的钱，却无视你的要求，并向其他人咨询如何花你的钱，你肯定会感到不高兴。如果商店的员工认为你真的不配得到这些家具，应该把它送给他们认为更值得的人，你不会认为这是正常或合理的。在与政府打交道时，就会发生类似的事情，这表明政府的“客户”实际上几乎没有控制权。

Yet when you think about it, when customers really are in the driver’s seat it would be considered outrageous that they should not get what they want. If you went into a store to buy furniture, and the salespeople took your money but then proceeded to ignore your requests and consult others about how to spend your money, you would quite rightly be upset. You would not think it normal or justifiable if the employees of the store argued that you really did not deserve the furniture, and that it should be shipped instead to someone whom they found more worthy. The fact that something very like this happens in dealings with government shows how little control its “customers” actually have.

无论如何衡量，民主政府的成本已超出控制范围，这与典型的情况不同，即客户偏好迫使供应商提高效率。大多数民主国家都长期存在赤字。这是雇员控制的财政政策特征。政府似乎特别反对降低其运营成本。全世界对当代政府几乎普遍的抱怨是，政治计划一旦建立，就很难缩减。解雇政府雇员几乎是不可能的。事实上，将原国有职能私有化的主要优势之一是私人控制通常使消除不必要的就业变得容易得多。从英国到阿根廷，新的私人管理者裁掉 50% 至 95% 的前政府雇员的情况并不少见。

By any measure, the costs of democratic government have surged out of control, unlike the typical situation where customer preferences force vendors to be efficient. Most democracies run chronic deficits. This is a fiscal policy characteristic of control by employees. Governments seem notably resistant to reducing the costs of their operations. An almost universal complaint about contemporary government worldwide is that political programs, once established, can be curtailed only with great difficulty. To fire a government employee is all but impossible. In fact, one of the principal advantages arising from privatization of formerly state-owned functions is that private control usually makes it far easier to weed out unnecessary employment. From Britain to Argentina, it has not been uncommon for the new private managers to shed 50-95 percent of former state employees.

再想想政府保护服务定价的财政依据。在大多数情况下，你会徒劳地寻找竞争对税率的影响暗示了政府服务的定价。近年来，即使是偶尔发生的打断正常政治讨论的关于减税的辩论也暴露了民主政府通常远离消费者控制的程度。减税的倡导者有时会辩称，政府收入实际上会增加，因为之前的税率太高，阻碍了经济活动。

Think, as well, of the basis upon which the fiscal terms of government’s protection service is priced. For the most part, you would look in vain for hints of competitive influences on tax rates according to which government services are priced. Even the occasional debates about lowering taxes that have interrupted normal political discourse in recent years betray how far removed democratic government has normally been from control by its customers. Advocates of lower taxes sometimes have argued that government revenues would actually increase because rates previously had been set so high that they discouraged economic activity.

他们通常想要强调的权衡不是司法管辖区之间的竞争，而是更令人惊奇的事情。他们并没有争辩说，因为香港的税率只有 15%，所以美国或德国的税率也不得高于 15%。恰恰相反。税收辩论通常假设纳税人面临的权衡不是在一个司法管辖区做生意还是在另一个司法管辖区做生意，而是在惩罚性税率下做生意还是休假。你被告知，如果不减轻税收负担，那些遭受掠夺性税收的生产者就会离开他们的收件箱去打高尔夫球。

The trade-off they normally intended to highlight was not competition between jurisdictions but something much more amazing. They did not argue that because tax rates in Hong Kong were only 15 percent, rates in the United States or Germany must be no higher than 15 percent. To the contrary. Tax debates have normally assumed that the trade-off facing the taxpayer was not between doing business in one jurisdiction or doing it in another, but between doing business at penal rates or taking a holiday. You were told that productive individuals subject to predatory taxation would walk away from their in-boxes and go golfing if their tax burdens were not eased.

这种争论甚至可能出现，这一事实表明民主福利国家所施加的保护成本与竞争基础相去甚远。累进所得税的条款在 20 世纪的每个民主福利国家都出现，与消费者所偏好的定价条款截然不同。通过将为支持垄断保护条款而征收的税收与电话服务关税进行比较，可以很容易地看出这一点，电话服务关税直到最近在大多数地方都是垄断的。如果电话公司试图以征收所得税的相同基础收取通话费用，客户会尖叫。假设电话公司向伦敦发送了一张 50,000 美元的账单，只是因为你在通话中碰巧达成了一项价值 125,000 美元的交易。无论是你还是任何其他头脑正常的客户都不会支付这笔费用。但这正是每个民主福利国家评估所得税的基础。

The fact that such an argument could even arise shows how far removed from a competitive footing the protection costs imposed by democratic welfare states have been. The terms of progressive income taxation, which emerged in every democratic welfare state during the course of the twentieth century, are dramatically unlike pricing provisions that would be preferred by customers. This can easily be seen by comparing taxation imposed to support a monopolistic provision of protection with tariffs for telephone service, which until recently was a monopoly in most places. Customers would scream bloody murder if a telephone company attempted to charge for calls on the same basis that income taxes are imposed. Suppose the phone company sent a bill for $50,000 for a call to London, just because you happened to conclude a deal worth $125,000 during a conversation. Neither you nor any other customer in his right mind would pay it. But that is exactly the basis upon which income taxes are assessed in every democratic welfare state.

当你仔细思考工业民主的运作条件时，将它们视为一种由雇员控制的政府形式更为合乎逻辑。将大众民主视为由雇员控制的政府有助于解释改变政府政策的困难。政府在许多方面似乎是为了雇员的利益而运作的。例如，大多数民主国家的公立学校似乎长期失灵且无法补救。如果顾客真正处于驾驶位置，他们会发现制定新的政策方向会更容易。那些为民主政府买单的人很少设定政府支出的条件。相反，政府作为一个合作社运作，既是外部的，也是内部的。私有控制和自然垄断。价格与成本关系不大。与私营企业相比，服务质量普遍较低。客户投诉难以解决。简而言之，大众民主导致政府由“雇员”控制。

When you think closely about the terms under which industrial democracies have operated, it is more logical to treat them as a form of government controlled by their employees. Thinking of mass democracy as government controlled by its employees helps explain the difficulty of changing government policy. Government in many respects appears to be run for the benefit of employees. For example, government schools in most democratic countries seem to malfunction chronically and without remedy. If customers truly were in the driver’s seat, they would find it easier to set new policy directions. Those who pay for democratic government seldom set the terms of government spending. Instead, government functions as a co-op that is both outside of proprietary control and operating as a natural monopoly. Prices bear little relation to costs. The quality of service is generally low compared to that in private enterprise. Customer grievances are hard to remedy. In short, mass democracy leads to control of government by its “employees.”

但是等一下。你可能会说，在大多数管辖区，选民人数远多于政府领薪人数。在这种情况下，雇员怎么可能占主导地位呢？福利国家的出现正是为了解决这一难题。由于没有足够的雇员来形成工作多数，越来越多的选民实际上被列入工资单，以接受各种转移支付。实际上，转移支付和补贴的接受者变成了政府的伪雇员，他们可以省去每天上班的麻烦。这是工业时代大政治逻辑决定的结果。

But wait. You may be saying that in most jurisdictions there are many more voters than there are persons on the government payroll. How could it be possible for employees to dominate under such conditions? The welfare state emerged to answer exactly this quandary. Since there were not otherwise enough employees to create a working majority, increasing numbers of voters were effectively put on the payroll to receive transfer payments of all kinds. In effect, the recipients of transfer payments and subsidies became pseudo employees of government who were able to dispense with the bother of reporting every day to work. It was a result dictated by the megapolitical logic of the industrial age.

当强制力量的规模比资源的有效部署更重要时，就像 1989 年之前的情况一样，大多数政府几乎不可能被其客户控制。正如前苏联的例子所充分说明的那样，直到几年前，国家还可能在大规模浪费资源的同时在世界上行使强大的权力。当暴力的回报很高且不断上升时，规模比效率更重要。较大的实体往往胜过较小的实体。那些更有效地调动军事资源的政府，即使以浪费大量资源为代价，也往往胜过那些更有效地利用资源的政府。

When the magnitude of coercive force is more important than the efficient deployment of resources, as was the case prior to 1989, it is all but impossible for most governments to be controlled by their customers. As the example of the late Soviet Union illustrated so well, until a few years ago it was possible for states to exercise great power in the world even while wasting resources on a massive scale. When returns to violence are high and rising, magnitude means more than efficiency. Larger entities tend to prevail over smaller ones. Those governments that are more effective in mobilizing military resources, even at the cost of wasting many of them, tend to prevail over those that utilize resources more efficiently.

想想这意味着什么。这不可避免地意味着，当规模比效率更重要时，受客户控制的政府无法获胜，而且往往无法生存。在这种情况下，军事上最有效的实体是那些为战争征用最多资源的实体。但真正受客户控制的政府不太可能全权从每个人的口袋里掏出资源。

Think what this means. It inescapably implies that when magnitude means more than efficiency, governments controlled by their customers cannot prevail, and often, cannot survive. Under such conditions, the entities that will be most effectively militarily are those that commandeer the most resources for war. But governments that are truly controlled by their customers who pay their bills are unlikely to have carte blanche to reach into the pockets of everyone to extract resources.

消费者通常希望看到他们为任何产品或服务（包括保护）支付的价格降低并受到控制。如果西方民主国家在冷战期间处于消费者控制之下，仅凭这一事实就会使它们在军事上成为较弱的竞争对手，因为这几乎肯定会减少流入政府的资源。请记住，在消费者统治的地方，价格和成本都应该受到严格控制。但事实并非如此。福利国家显然是冷战期间支出竞赛的赢家。各种评论家都认为他们获胜的一个因素是他们有能力将苏联花光，使其破产。

Customers normally wish to see the prices they pay for any product or service, including protection, lowered and kept under control. If the Western democracies had been under customer control during the Cold War, that fact alone would have made them weaker competitors militarily, because it would almost certainly have curtailed the flow of resources into the government. Remember, where customers rule, both prices and costs should be expected to be under tight control. But this is hardly what happened. The welfare states were manifestly the winners of the spending contest during the Cold War. Commentators of all stripes cited as a factor in their triumph their ability to spend the Soviet Union into bankruptcy.

正是这一事实凸显了低效率民主制度的低效率使得它在暴力不断增加的时期占据了超级政治的主导地位。大规模的军事开支，以及由此产生的浪费，代表着资本为私利而进行的明显次优配置。我们之前曾指出，虽然福利国家在经济上比国家社会主义制度更有效率，但在创造财富方面，它们远不如香港这样的自由放任飞地。具有讽刺意味的是，民主福利国家与更不受约束的自由市场制度相比效率低下，正是这种低效率使其在工业主义的超级政治条件下取得了成功。

It is precisely this fact that highlights the way in which the inefficiencies of democracy made it megapolitically predominant during a period of rising returns to violence. Massive military spending, with all its waste, represents a distinctly suboptimal deployment of capital for private gain. We suggested earlier that while welfare states were economically efficient as compared to state socialist systems, they are far less efficient for the creation of wealth than laissez-faire enclaves, like Hong Kong. Ironically, it was this very inefficiency of the democratic welfare state as compared to a more unencumbered free-market system that made it successful—in the megapolitical conditions of industrialism.

民主所培育的低效率如何成为暴力时代民主成功的因素之一？解开这一明显悖论的关键在于认识到两点：

How did inefficiency fostered by democracy become a factor in its success during the Age of Violence? The key to unraveling this apparent paradox lies in recognizing two points:

1. 现代时期，主权国家的成功不在于创造财富，而在于建立一支能够对其他国家施以压倒性暴力的军事力量。要做到这一点需要金钱，但金钱本身无法赢得战争。挑战不在于建立一个经济效率最高或增长率最快的体系，而在于建立一个能够提取更多资源并将其引导到军队的体系。从本质上讲，军事开支是一个财务回报本身很低或没有回报的领域。

1. Success for a sovereignty in the modern period lay not in creating wealth but in creating a military force capable of deploying overpowering violence against any other state. Money was needed to do that, but money itself could not win a battle. The challenge was not to create a system with the most efficient economy or the most rapid rate of growth, but to create a system that could extract more resources and channel them into the military. By its nature, military spending is an area where the financial returns per se are low or nonexistent.

2. 获得将资金投资于几乎没有直接财务回报的活动（如纳税）的许可的最简单方法是向金钱觊觎者以外的人征求许可。荷兰人能够以价值 23 美元的珠子购买曼哈顿的方法之一是，他们向特定的印第安人提出要约，但这些印第安人并不是曼哈顿的真正所有者。营销人员说，在这种情况下，“获得同意”要容易得多。例如，假设作为本书的作者，我们希望您支付的不是封面价格，而是您年收入的 40% 来购买一本书。如果我们问别人，而不必问你，我们获得许可的可能性就会大得多。事实上，如果我们可以依靠几个你甚至不认识的人的同意，我们的说服力会大得多。我们可以举行一次临时选举，HL Mencken 将其描述为“偷来的货物的提前拍卖”，这比他想象的要夸张得多。为了使这个例子更加现实，我们同意与这些匿名旁观者分享从您那里收集到的部分资金，以换取他们的支持。

2. The easiest way to obtain permission to invest funds in activities with little or no direct financial return, like tax payments, is to ask for permission from someone other than the person whose money is coveted. One of the ways that the Dutch were able to purchase Manhattan for twenty-three dollars’ worth of beads is that the particular Indians to whom they made the offer were not the ones who properly owned it. “Getting to yes,” as the marketing people say, is much easier under those terms. Suppose, for example, that as authors of this book we wanted you to pay not its cover price but 40 percent of your annual income for a copy. We would be far likelier to get permission to do so if we asked someone else, and did not have to ask you. In fact, we would be far more persuasive if we could rely instead upon the consent of several people you do not even know. We could hold an ad hoc election, what H. L. Mencken described, with less exaggeration than he might have thought, as “an advanced auction of stolen goods.” And to make the example more realistic, we would agree to share some of the money we collected from you with these anonymous bystanders in exchange for their support.

这就是现代民主福利国家所要扮演的角色。它是工业时代无与伦比的制度，因为它在关键时刻既有效率，也有低效率。它结合了私有制的效率和创造财富的激励机制，以及一种促进财富不受限制获取的机制。民主制度保持了财富创造者的口袋被打开。它在世界暴力事件不断增加的高水位时期取得了军事上的成功，正是因为它使客户难以有效地限制政府征收的税收或其他资助军事资源支出的方式，例如通货膨胀。

That is the role the modern democratic welfare state evolved to fulfill. It was an unsurpassed system in the Industrial Age because it was both efficient and inefficient where it counted. It combined the efficiency of private ownership and incentives for the creation of wealth with a mechanism to facilitate essentially unchecked access to that wealth. Democracy kept the pockets of wealth producers open. It succeeded militarily during the high-water period of rising returns to violence in the world precisely because it made it difficult for customers to effectively restrict the taxes the government collected or other ways of funding the outlay of resources for the military, such as inflation.

为什么顾客无法主导

Why Customers Could Not Dominate

在现代时期，支付“保护费”的人无法成功地拒绝向主权国家提供资源，即使采取集体行动，因为这样做只会使他们面临被其他可能更具敌意的国家压倒的危险。这是冷战期间显而易见的考虑。在西方主要工业国家中，承担了政府成本不成比例份额的消费者或纳税人没有资格拒绝缴纳高额税款。结果将是他们面临被苏联或其他能够组织暴力的侵略性团体全面没收的风险。

Those who paid for “protection” during the modern period were not in a position to successfully deny resources to the sovereign, even acting collectively, when doing so would simply have exposed them to being overpowered by other, possibly more hostile states. This was an obvious consideration during the Cold War. The customers, or taxpayers, who bore a disproportionate share of the cost of government in the leading Western industrial states were in no position to refuse to pay hefty taxes. The result would have been to expose themselves to total confiscation by the Soviet Union or another aggressive group capable of organizing violence.

工业主义与民主

Industrialism and Democracy

从长远来看，大众民主可能被证明是一种不合时宜的现象，在工业时代结束后不久就会消失。当然，大众民主和民族国家是十八世纪末随着法国大革命而出现的，这可能是对实际收入激增的回应。1750 年左右，西欧的收入开始大幅增加，部分原因是气候变暖。与此同时，技术创新时期，工匠的技术工作被非技术工人，甚至妇女和儿童也可以操作的设备所取代。这种新的工业设备提高了非技术工人的收入，使收入分配更加平等。

Taking a longer view, mass democracy may prove to be an anachronism that will not long survive the end of the Industrial Age. Certainly, mass democracy and the nation-state emerged together with the French Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century, probably as a response to a surge in real income. Incomes had begun to rise significantly in Western Europe about 1750, partly as a result of warmer weather. This coincided with a period of technological innovation that displaced skilled jobs of artisans with equipment that could be operated by unskilled workers, even women and children. This new industrial equipment raised earnings for unskilled workers, making the income distribution more equal.

革命的关键触发点可能并非如人们通常所想的那样，是人们在条件改善时倾向于反抗的荒谬想法。更重要的可能是，当收入上升到一定水平时，早期现代国家终于可以绕过他们以前为资源讨价还价的私人中介和巨头，转向“直接统治”制度，即国家政府直接与个人公民打交道，以越来越高的税率征税，并要求他们以微薄的报酬服兵役，以换取各种福利^。12

The crucial trigger point of revolution may not have been, as is often thought, the perverse idea that people tend to revolt when conditions improve. More important may be the fact that when incomes had risen to a certain level, it at last became practical for the early-modern state to circumvent the private intermediaries and powerful magnates with whom they had previously bargained for resources, and move to a system of “direct rule” in which a national government dealt directly with individual citizens, taxing them at ever higher rates and demanding poorly compensated military service in exchange for provision of various benefits.¹²

因为新兴中产阶级很快就拥有了足够的钱来征税，统治者不再像以前那样需要与强大的地主或大商人谈判，正如历史学家查尔斯·蒂利所说写道，“能够阻止一个强大国家的建立”，这个强大国家将“夺取他们的资产，限制他们的交易。” ¹³很容易理解，为什么当政府与数百万公民单独打交道时，它们能够更成功地攫取资源，而不是与相对少数的领主、公爵、伯爵、主教、雇佣兵、自由城市和其他半主权实体打交道时，欧洲国家的统治者在 18 世纪中叶之前不得不与之谈判。

Because the emerging middle class soon had enough money to tax, it was no longer essential, as it previously had been, for rulers to negotiate with powerful landlords or great merchants who were, as historian Charles Tilly wrote, “in a position to prevent the creation of a powerful state” that would “seize their assets and cramp their transactions.”¹³ It is easy to see why governments were more successful in extracting resources when they dealt with millions of citizens individually rather than with a relative handful of lords, dukes, earls, bishops, contract mercenaries, free cities, and other semisovereign entities with whom the rulers of European states were obliged to negotiate prior to the mid-eighteenth century.

实际收入的提高使得政府能够采取一种策略，将更多的资源置于其控制之下。从数百万人那里征收的小额税收可以产生比少数有权势的人缴纳的大笔税收更多的收入。更重要的是，多数人比少数人更容易对付，少数人通常不愿意捐出他们的钱，而且更有条件抵制。

Rising real incomes allowed governments to adopt a strategy that placed more resources under their control. Small sums taken in taxes from millions could produce more revenue than larger amounts paid by a few powerful people. What is more, the many were far easier to deal with than the few, who were generally unwilling to give their money away and were far better placed to resist.

毕竟，与国家相比，典型的农民、小商人或工人所拥有的资源微不足道。法国大革命前夕，西欧的典型个人根本不可能有效地与国家谈判以降低税率，或有效地抵制威胁其利益的政府计划和政策。但这正是强大的私人巨头几个世纪以来一直在做的事情，并将继续这样做。他们有效地抵抗统治者并与他们谈判，限制了统治者征用资源的能力。

After all, the typical farmer, small merchant, or worker possessed vanishingly small resources as compared to the state itself. It was not even remotely possible that the typical private individual in Western Europe on the eve of the French Revolution could have effectively bargained with the state to reduce his tax rate, or mounted an effective resistance to government plans and policies that threatened his interests. But this is precisely what powerful private magnates had done for centuries and would continue to do. They effectively resisted and bargained with rulers, restraining their ability to commandeer resources.

“发动战争加速了从间接统治到直接统治的转变。几乎任何发动战争的国家都会发现，它无法用其积累的储备和经常性收入来支付战争费用。几乎所有发动战争的国家都会大量借贷、提高税收，并从那些不愿将资源用于其他用途的公民手中夺取作战手段（包括人力）。” ¹⁴

—查尔斯·蒂利

“Going to war accelerated the move from indirect to direct rule. Almost any state that makes war finds that it cannot pay for the effort from its accumulated reserves and current revenues. Almost all warmaking states borrow extensively, raise taxes, and seize the means of combat—including men—from reluctant citizens who have other uses for their resources.”¹⁴

—CHARLES TILLY

18 世纪中叶波兰的例子完美地说明了这一点。1760 年，波兰国民军由 18,000 名士兵组成。与邻国奥地利、普鲁士和俄罗斯统治者指挥的军队相比，这是一支微不足道的军队，其中最小的几个国家都能控制 100,000 名士兵的常备军。事实上，1760 年的波兰国民军甚至与波兰境内其他武装部队相比规模都很小。波兰贵族的联合部队有 30000 人^。15

The example of Poland in the mid-eighteenth century illustrates this perfectly. In 1760, the Polish national army comprised eighteen thousand soldiers. This was a meager force compared to the armies commanded by rulers of neighboring Austria, Prussia, and Russia, the least of whom could control a standing army of 100,000 soldiers. In fact, the Polish national army in 1760 was small even in comparison with other units under arms within Poland. The combined forces of the Polish nobility were thirty thousand men.¹⁵

如果波兰国王能够直接与数百万波兰人互动并直接向他们征税，而不是仅限于榨取如果波兰中央政府能够通过强大的波兰巨头的捐助间接获得资源，那么毫无疑问，波兰中央政府将能够筹集更多的收入，从而支付更大的军队费用。

If the Polish king had been able to interact directly with millions of individual Poles and tax them directly, rather than being limited to extracting resources indirectly through the contributions of the powerful Polish magnates, there is little doubt that the Polish central government would have been in a position to raise far more revenues, and thus pay for a larger army.

面对无法与数百万普通人协同行动的普通人，中央政府在任何地方都拥有不可抗拒的强大力量。但 1760 年，波兰国王没有直接向其公民征税的选择。他必须通过领主、富商和其他显贵来处理，这些人是一个小而有凝聚力的群体。他们可以协同行动，阻止国王在未经他们同意的情况下征用他们的资源。鉴于波兰贵族的军队比他多得多，国王没有能力坚持这一点。

Against ordinary individuals, who were not in a position to act in concert with millions of other ordinary individuals, the central authorities were to prove irresistibly powerful everywhere. But the king of Poland lacked the option of directly taxing his citizens in 1760. He had to deal through the lords, wealthy merchants, and other notables, who were a small, cohesive group. They could and did act in concert to keep the king from commandeering their resources without their consent. Given that the Polish nobility had far more troops than he did, the king was in no position to insist.

事实证明，在暴力时代，无法绕过富人和权贵聚集资源的军事劣势是决定性的。几年之内，波兰就不再是一个独立的国家。它被奥地利、普鲁士和俄罗斯的入侵所征服，这三个国家的军队都比波兰的小军队大很多倍。在每个国家，统治者都找到了绕过富商和贵族限制其资源征用能力的方法。

As it turned out, the military disadvantage of failing to circumvent the wealthy and powerful in gathering resources was decisive in the Age of Violence. Within a few years, Poland ceased to exist as an independent country. It was conquered by invasions from Austria, Prussia, and Russia, three countries with armies each of which was many times bigger than Poland’s small force. In each of those countries, the rulers had found paths to circumvent the capacity of the wealthy merchants and the nobility to limit the commandeering of their resources.

法国大革命后

After the French Revolution

法国大革命导致军队规模进一步扩大，这一事实表明，在暴力行为不断增加的情况下，民主战略的力量是不可忽视的。自法国大革命以来，各国政府达成的协议是，让普通民众参与到前所未有的生活，以换取他们代替雇佣兵参战，并用不断增加的收入支付越来越重的税收负担。

The French Revolution resulted in an even greater surge in the size of armies, a fact that demonstrated the strength of the democratic strategy when returns to violence were rising. The bargain governments struck from the French Revolution onward was to provide an unprecedented degree of involvement in the lives of average people, in exchange for their participation in wars in place of mercenaries, and paying a growing burden of taxes from their rising incomes.

正如蒂莉所说，

As Tilly said,

国家的范围远远超出了军事核心，公民开始要求国家提供非常广泛的保护、裁决、生产和分配。随着国家立法机构将其范围扩大到远远超出税收批准的范围，它们成为所有组织良好的团体索赔的目标，这些团体的利益受到国家的影响或可能受到影响。直接统治和大众国家政治一起成长，并相互加强^。16

The state’s sphere expanded far beyond its military core, and its citizens began to make claims on it for a very wide range of protection, adjudication, production, and distribution. As national legislatures extended their own ranges well beyond the approval of taxation, they became the targets of claims from all well-organized groups whose interests the state did or could affect. Direct rule and mass national politics grew up together, and reinforced each other mightily.¹⁶

18 世纪的逻辑一直延续到 1989 年柏林墙倒塌。随着工业时代的发展，非技术工人的收入不断上升，使大众民主变得更加优化资源开采的有效方法。结果，政府规模不断扩大，20 世纪平均工业化国家的政府总收入增加了约 0.5%。

The same logic that was true in the eighteenth century remained true until 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell. As the Industrial Age advanced, incomes for unskilled work continued to rise, making mass democracy an even more effective method of optimizing the extraction of resources. As a result, government grew and grew, adding about 0.5 percent to its total claims on annual income in the average industrial country over the twentieth century.

在 1989 年之前的工业时代，民主成为军事上最有效的政府形式，正是因为民主使得难以或不可能对国家对资源的征用施加有效的限制。向所有人提供慷慨的福利待遇，让大多数选民实际上成为政府的雇员。这成为所有主要工业国家的主要政治特征，因为选民作为保护服务的客户，处于无法有效控制政府的弱势地位。他们不仅面临共产主义制度的侵略性威胁，因为国家控制着整个经济，因此可以为军事目的生产大量资源，而且由于另一个原因，纳税人对政府的真正控制也是不切实际的。

During the Industrial Age prior to 1989, democracy emerged as the most militarily effective form of government precisely because democracy made it difficult or impossible to impose effective limits on the commandeering of resources by the state. Generous provision of welfare benefits to one and all invited a majority of voters to become, in effect, employees of the government. This became the predominant political feature of all leading industrial countries because voters were in a weak position to effectively control the government in their role as customers for the service of protection. Not only did they face the aggressive menace of Communist systems, which could produce large resources for military purposes since the state controlled the entire economy, but true taxpayer control of government was also impractical for another reason.

数百万普通公民无法有效地合作来保护自己的利益。由于合作的障碍很高，而任何个人成功捍卫群体共同利益的回报都很低，数百万普通公民在向政府扣留资产方面不会像那些有更优惠激励的小团体那样成功。

Millions of average citizens cannot work together effectively to protect their interests. Because the obstacles to their cooperation are high, and the return to any individual for successfully defending the group’s common interests is minimal, millions of ordinary citizens will not be as successful in withholding their assets from the government as will smaller groups with more favorable incentives.

因此，在其他条件相同的情况下，你会预期，大众民主国家的政府所掌握的总资源比例会比寡头政治国家或分散主权的体制下更高。在分散主权的体制下，巨头们掌握着军事力量，并组建自己的军队，就像十八世纪之前的近代欧洲各地的情况一样。

Other things being equal, therefore, you would expect a higher proportion of total resources to be commandeered by government in a mass democracy than in an oligarchy, or in a system of fragmented sovereignty where magnates wielded military power and fielded their own armies, as they did everywhere in early-modern Europe prior to the eighteenth century.

因此，西方世界民主发展的一个关键但很少被研究的原因是，在暴力回报不断上升的时代，谈判成本的相对重要性。从少数人那里获取资源的成本总是比从多数人那里获取资源的成本更高。

Thus a crucial though seldom examined reason for the growth of democracy in the Western world is the relative importance of negotiation costs at a time when returns to violence were rising. It was always costlier to draw resources from the few than from the many.

相对较小的富人精英群体比广大民众更具凝聚力和效率。小群体有更强的合作动机。他们几乎不可避免地会比大众群体更有效地保护自己的利益。17^即使该群体的大多数成员选择不合作采取任何共同行动，少数富人也可能有能力部署足够的资源来完成工作。

A relatively small, elite group of rich represent a more coherent and effective body than a large mass of citizens. The small group has stronger incentives to work together. It will almost inevitably be more effective at protecting its interests than will a mass group.¹⁷ And even if most members of the group choose not to cooperate with any common action, a few who are rich may be capable of deploying enough resources to get the job done.

有了民主决策，民族国家就可以对数百万人行使更全面的权力，因为这些人无法轻易合作，集体采取行动以维护自己的利益，而与人数少得多的人打交道则不然，因为人数少得多的人更容易克服捍卫其集中利益的组织困难。民主仍然更引人注目的优势是创建合法的决策规则，允许国家利用富人的资源，而无需直接讨价还价。简而言之，民主作为一种决策机制非常适合工业时代的大政治条件。它与民族国家相得益彰，因为它有助于将军事权力集中在统治者手中，而当时，动用武力的规模比动员的效率更重要。

With democratic decision-making, the nation-state could exercise power much more completely over millions of persons, who could not easily cooperate to act collectively in their own behalf, than it could in dealings with a much smaller number who could more easily overcome the organizational difficulties of defending their concentrated interests. Democracy had the still more compelling advantage of creating a legitimizing decision rule that allowed the state to tap the resources of the well-to-do without having to bargain directly for their permission. In short, democracy as a decision mechanism was well fitted to the megapolitical conditions of the Industrial Age. It complemented the nation-state because it facilitated the concentration of military power in the hands of those running it at a time when the magnitude of force brought to bear was more important than the efficiency with which it was mobilized.

法国大革命明确地证明了这一点，它提高了战场上的军事力量。此后，其他竞争性民族国家别无选择，只能采用类似的组织，其合法性最终与民主决策挂钩。

This was demonstrated decisively with the French Revolution, which raised the magnitude of military force on the battlefield. Thereafter, other competitive nation-states had little choice but to converge on a similar organization, with legitimacy ultimately tied to democratic decision-making.

总而言之，民主民族国家在过去两个世纪的成功有以下几个隐秘的原因：

To summarize, the democratic nation-state succeeded during the past two centuries for these hidden reasons:

1. 暴力事件不断增加，使得武力规模比效率作为治理原则更加重要。
2. There were rising returns to violence that made magnitude of force more important than efficiency as a governing principle.
3. 收入足以超出最低生活保障，使得国家能够收集大量的总资源，而不必与有能力抵抗的强大巨头进行谈判。
4. Incomes rose sufficiently above subsistence that it became possible for the state to collect large amounts of total resources without having to negotiate with powerful magnates who were capable of resisting.
5. 事实证明，民主与自由市场的运作足够兼容，有利于创造越来越多的财富。
6. Democracy proved sufficiently compatible with the operation of free markets to be conducive to the generation of increasing amounts of wealth.
7. 民主促成了政府由“雇员”控制，从而确保很难削减政府开支，包括军费开支。
8. Democracy facilitated domination of government by its “employees,” thereby assuring that it would be difficult to curtail expenditures, including military expenditures.
9. 事实证明，民主作为一种决策规则，能够有效阻止富人采取一致行动来限制民族国家征税或以其他方式保护其资产免遭侵犯的能力。
10. Democracy as a decision-rule proved to be an effective antidote to the ability of the wealthy to act in concert to restrict the nation-state’s ability to tax or otherwise protect their assets from invasion.

民主成为军事上的制胜策略，因为它有助于将更多资源集中到国家手中。与其他依靠其他原则获得合法性的主权形式（如封建征税、君权神授、企业宗教义务或富人的自愿捐赠）相比，大众民主在军事上是最有力的，因为它是在工业经济中聚集资源的最可靠方式。

Democracy became the militarily winning strategy because it facilitated the gathering of more resources into the hands of the state. Compared to other styles of sovereignty that depended for their legitimacy on other principles, such as the feudal levy, the divine right of kings, corporate religious duty, or the voluntary contributions of the rich, mass democracy became militarily the most potent because it was the surest way to gather resources in an industrial economy.

“民族，作为一个文化界定的共同体，是现代性的最高象征价值；它被赋予了一种只有宗教才能比拟的近乎神圣的特性。事实上，这种近乎神圣的特性源于宗教。在在实践中，民族要么成为宗教的现代世俗替代品，要么成为宗教最强大的盟友。在现代，民族产生的共同情感受到高度重视，并被视为群体忠诚的基础。……现代国家往往是受益者，鉴于其至高无上的权力，这一点并不奇怪。” ¹⁸

—JOSEP R. L LOBERA

“The nation, as a culturally defined community, is the highest symbolic value of modernity; it has been endowed with a quasi-sacred character equalled only by religion. In fact, this quasi-sacred character derives from religion. In practice, the nation has become either the modern, secular substitute of religion or its most powerful ally. In modern times the communal sentiments generated by the nation are highly regarded and sought after as the basis for group loyalty.… That the modern state is often the beneficiary should hardly be surprising given its paramount power.”¹⁸

—JOSEP R. LLOBERA

民族主义

Nationalism

民族主义也同样如此，它成为了大众民主的必然结果。能够运用民族主义的国家发现，它们能够以较小的成本动员更大的军队。民族主义是一项发明，它使国家能够扩大其军事效力的规模。就像政治本身一样，民族主义在很大程度上是一项现代发明。正如社会学家 Josep Llobera 在其关于民族主义兴起的详实著作中所表明的那样，民族是一个想象的共同体，在很大程度上是在法国大革命期间作为动员国家权力的一种方式而产生的。正如他所说：“从现代意义上讲，民族意识自法国大革命以来才存在，自 1789 年制宪议会将法​​国人民等同于法兰西民族以来才存在。” ¹⁹

Much the same can be said of nationalism, which became a corollary to mass democracy. States that could employ nationalism found that they could mobilize larger armies at a smaller cost. Nationalism was an invention that enabled a state to increase the scale at which it was militarily effective. Like politics itself, nationalism is mostly a modern invention. As sociologist Josep Llobera has shown in his richly documented book on the rise of nationalism, the nation is an imagined community that in large measure came into being as a way of mobilizing state power during the French Revolution. As he puts it, “In the modern sense of the term, national consciousness has only existed since the French Revolution, since the time when in 1789 the Constituent Assembly equated the people of France with the French nation.”¹⁹

民族主义使动员权力和控制大量民众变得更容易。民族国家通过强调和强调人们共同拥有的特征（尤其是口语）而形成。这促进了无需中介干预的统治。它简化了官僚机构的任务。只需以一种语言颁布的法令可以比必须翻译成各种语言的法令更快地传达，而且混乱更少。因此，民族主义往往会降低控制较大区域的成本。在民族主义出现之前，早期现代国家需要领主、公爵、伯爵、主教、自由城市以及其他企业和种族中介的帮助，从“农民”到军事合同商人和雇佣兵，以收取税收、招募军队和履行其他政府职能。

Nationalism made it easier to mobilize power and control large numbers of people. Nation-states formed by underlining and emphasizing characteristics that people held in common, particularly spoken language. This facilitated rule without the intervention of intermediaries. It simplified the tasks of bureaucracy. Edicts that need only be promulgated in one language can be dispatched more quickly and with less confusion than those that must be translated into a Babel of tongues. Nationalism, therefore, tended to lower the cost of controlling larger areas. Before nationalism, the early-modern state required the aid of lords, dukes, earls, bishops, free cities, and other corporate and ethnic intermediaries, from tax “farmers” to military contract merchants and mercenaries to collect revenues, raise troops and conduct other government functions.

民族主义还通过鼓励群体认同国家利益，大大降低了动员军事人员的成本。将群体情感与国家利益结合起来具有如此巨大的优势，以至于大多数国家，甚至所谓的国际主义苏联，都把民族主义作为一种互补的意识形态。

Nationalism also decisively lowered the costs of mobilizing military personnel by encouraging group identification with the interests of the state. There was such a substantial advantage in harnessing group feeling to the interests of the state that most states, even the allegedly internationalist Soviet Union, converged on nationalism as a complementary ideology.

^{从长远角度看，民族主义与}国家本身一样，是一种异常现象。正如历史学家威廉·麦克尼尔所记录的那样，多民族主权在过去是常态。20用麦克尼尔的话来说，“一个政府理应只统治一个民族的公民，这种观念在中世纪末期开始在西欧发展起来。” ²¹早期的民族主义实体是普鲁士同盟 (Preussicher Bund)，它于 1440 年成立，反对条顿骑士团的统治。条顿骑士团的一些特点在前面被强调为与民族国家不同的主权的极端例子。条顿骑士团是一种特许公司，其成员几乎没有一个是普鲁士本地人。它的总部曾从不来梅和吕贝克迁到耶路撒冷，再到阿克、威尼斯，最后到维斯瓦河畔的马林贝格。它曾统治过特兰西瓦尼亚的布尔岑兰地区。一个与国家如此不同的主权国家成为早期尝试的对象也就不足为奇了，旨在动员民族情绪作为组织权力的一个因素。然而，作为早期民族主义与后来的民族主义有多么不同的一个表现，普鲁士联盟的德语贵族向波兰国王请愿，将普鲁士置于波兰的统治之下，这主要是因为即使在那时，波兰国王也是一个相对较弱的君主，他们不被期望像条顿骑士团那样进行严厉的统治。

Seen in a longer perspective, nationalism is as much an anomaly as the state itself. As historian William McNeill has documented, polyethnic sovereignties were the norm in the past.²⁰ In McNeill’s words, “The idea that a government rightfully should rule only over citizens of a single ethnos started to develop in Western Europe towards the end of the Middle Ages.”²¹ An early nationalist entity was the Prussian League (Preussicher Bund), which formed in 1440 in opposition to rule by the Teutonic Order. Some of the characteristics of the order were highlighted earlier as a polar example of a sovereignty unlike the nation-state. The Teutonic Order was a kind of chartered company almost none of whose members were native to Prussia. Its headquarters shifted at various times from Bremen and Lübeck to Jerusalem to Acre to Venice and on to Marienberg on the Vistula. At one time it ruled the district of Burzenland in Transylvania. It is not surprising that a sovereignty so unlike a state would became the object of one of the early attempts to mobilize national feeling as a factor in organizing power. However, as an indication of how different early nationalism was from later varieties, the German-speaking nobles of the Prussian League petitioned the king of Poland to place Prussia under Polish rule, largely because even then the Polish king was a relatively weak monarch who was not expected to rule with the same rigor as the Teutonic Order.

民族主义的早期形态在火药革命前夕开始发挥作用。随着早期现代国家的发展，民族主义不断发展，在法国大革命时期其重要性有了质的飞跃。我们认为，民族主义作为一种力量的观念已经开始消退。第一次世界大战结束时，伍德罗·威尔逊试图让欧洲每个民族都建立自己的国家，民族主义很可能在那时达到了鼎盛时期。现在，民族主义已成为一股反动力量，在收入下降、前景黯淡的地方（如塞尔维亚）尤为明显。

Nationalism, in its early incarnations, came into play just prior to the Gunpowder Revolution. It continued to develop as the early-modern state developed, taking a quantum leap in importance at the time of the French Revolution. We believe that nationalism as an idea of force has already begun to recede. It probably reached its heyday with Woodrow Wilson’s attempt to endow every ethnic group in Europe with its own state at the close of World War I. It is now a reactionary force, inflamed in places with falling incomes and declining prospects like Serbia.

正如我们后面所探讨的，随着西方民主国家福利国家的崩溃，我们预计民族主义将成为怀念强制的低技能人士的主要集会主题。你还没有看到任何东西。对于西方的大多数人来说，共产主义灭亡的后果似乎相对温和。你已经看到军费开支下降、铝价暴跌，以及 NHL 有了新的冰球球员来源。这是好消息。这是大多数在二十世纪成年的人都会为之喝彩的消息，尤其是如果他们是冰球迷的话。大多数注定不那么受欢迎的消息仍未到来。

As we explore later, we expect nationalism to be a major rallying theme of persons with low skills nostalgic for compulsion as the welfare state collapses in the Western democracies. You haven’t seen anything yet. For most persons in the West the fallout from the death of Communism has seemed relatively benign. You have seen a drop in military spending, a plunge in aluminum prices, and a new source of hockey players for the NHL. That is the good news. It is news that most people who came of age in the twentieth century could applaud, especially if they are hockey fans. Most of the news that is destined to prove less popular is still to come.

随着工业时代的到来，民主所满足的超大政治条件正在迅速消失，因此，大众民主和福利国家能否在信息时代新的超大政治条件下长久生存是值得怀疑的。

With the passage of the Industrial Age, the megapolitical conditions that democracy satisfied are rapidly ceasing to exist. Therefore, it is doubtful that mass democracy and the welfare state will survive long in the new megapolitical conditions of the Information Age.

“国会不是民主的殿堂，而是交换法律的市场。”

——秘鲁总统A LBERTO F UJIMORI

“Congress was not a temple of democracy, it was a market for bartering laws.”

—ALBERTO FUJIMORI, president of Peru

事实上，未来的历史学家可能会说，我们已经看到了第一次后现代政变——1993 年秘鲁国会被解散。这一事件在领先的工业民主国家中几乎没有引起多少关注。但随着时间的推移，它可能比传统分析家所认为的更有意义。少数考虑过这个问题的人往往认为这只是又一次权力争夺，这种争夺在拉丁美洲历史上已经变得令人沮丧地司空见惯。但我们认为，这也许是走向非法化治理形式的第一步，这种治理形式存在的直接大政治理由已随着向信息时代的过渡而开始消失。藤森关闭国会是政治承诺最终贬值的一个症状。当其他立法机构的信誉耗尽时，它们也可能遭遇类似的命运。

Indeed, future historians may report that we have already seen the first postmodern coup—the remarkable padlocking of the congress in Peru in 1993. This was hardly an event that attracted much favorable notice in the leading industrial democracies. But it may turn out to mean more in the fullness of time than conventional analysts would suggest. The few who have thought about it tend to see it as just another power grab of the kind that has become depressingly familiar in the history of Latin America. But we see it as perhaps the first step toward delegitimizing a form of governance whose immediate megapolitical reason for being has begun to disappear with the transition to the Information Age. Fujimori’s closure of the congress is a symptom of the ultimate devaluation of political promises. A similar fate could await other legislatures when their credit is exhausted.

技术变革正在侵蚀工业化，许多国家的政府因此陷入困境，要么无法正常运转，要么运转不良。尤其是立法机构，似乎越来越失灵。他们制定的法律在五十年前可能只是愚蠢的，但在今天却很危险。这在秘鲁尤为明显，到 1993 年，该国的内部主权几乎崩溃。

The shift in technology that is eroding industrialism has trapped many countries with governments that no longer work. Or work badly. Legislatures, in particular, appear to be increasingly dysfunctional. They grind out laws that might have been merely stupid fifty years ago but are dangerous today. This was spectacularly obvious in Peru, where the internal sovereignty of the state had almost collapsed by 1993.

“袭击、绑架、强奸和谋杀与日益激进的驾驶习惯和不安全的街道相伴而生。警察逐渐失去了对局势的控制，一些警察卷入丑闻，成为经验丰富的罪犯。……人们逐渐习惯了法律之外的生活。盗窃、非法扣押和工厂接管已成为日常事件……” ²²

—埃南多·德索托

“Attacks, kidnappings, rapes and murders have coincided with increasingly aggressive driving habits and unsafe streets. The police have gradually lost control of the situation and some of their members have been involved in scandals and become seasoned criminals.… People have gradually grown used to living outside the law. Theft, illegal seizure and factory takeovers have become everyday occurrences.…”²²

—HERNANDO DE SOTO

秘鲁的废墟

Peru in Ruins

从某种意义上说，1993 年的秘鲁已不再是一个现代民族国家。它仍然有国旗和军队，但大多数机构都已成废墟。甚至连监狱都被囚犯占领了。这种瓦解可以归因于多种原因，但大多数专家对此的解释都没有抓住要点。秘鲁是技术变革的早期受害者，这种变革使封闭的经济体功能失调，并削弱了各地的中央集权。这些超级政治压力加剧，因为秘鲁国会等决策机构受到不正当激励的束缚，加剧了他们最需要解决的问题。

In a sense, Peru was no longer a modern nation-state in 1993. It still had a flag and an army, but most of its institutions lay in ruins. Even the prisons had been taken over by the inmates. This disintegration could be traced to a number of causes, but most expert attempts to explain it miss the real point. Peru was an early casualty of the technological change that is making closed economies dysfunctional and undermining central authority everywhere. These megapolitical stresses are compounded because decision-making institutions like the Peruvian congress are trapped by perverse incentives into aggravating the very problems that they most need to solve.

秘鲁的代议制民主就像一对掷骰子。作为扩大国家权力的决策机制，它是无与伦比的。但当新的环境要求权力下放时，使权力下放成为可能的固有偏见民主在旧有的超级政治条件下如此有用，但如今却越来越失去作用。国会通过的法律正在迅速摧毁任何价值基础或对法律的尊重。正如德索托在《另一条道路》中所说： “小利益集团相互争斗，导致破产，牵连公职人员。政府施予特权。法律被用来给予和剥夺远远超出道德允许的范围。” ²³像秘鲁这样的国会，完全受制于特殊利益集团，其道德地位与一群拍卖赃物的盗贼团伙一样。它使自由市场成为非法，从而使法律变得荒谬可笑。正如德索托在前藤森时代所写的那样：

Representative democracy in Peru was like a pair of loaded dice. As a decision mechanism for aggrandizing the state, it was unsurpassed. But when new circumstances called for devolving power, the inherent biases that made democracy so useful under the old megapolitical conditions made it increasingly dysfunctional. The very laws passed by the congress were rapidly destroying any foundation of value or respect for the law. As de Soto put it in The Other Path, “Small interest groups fight among themselves, cause bankruptcies, implicate public officials. Governments hand out privileges. The law is used to give and take away far more than morality permits.”²³ A congress like that in Peru, entirely in thrall to special-interest groups, has all the moral stature of a gang of fences auctioning off stolen goods. It made the free market illegal, and consequently made the law ridiculous. As de Soto writes of the pre-Fujimori period:

目的和手段的彻底颠覆使秘鲁社会的生活发生了翻天覆地的变化，以至于有些行为虽然在官方上是犯罪行为，但集体意识却不再谴责。走私就是一个例子。从贵族贵妇到最卑微的男子，每个人都会获得走私货物。没有人对此有顾忌；相反，这被视为对个人智慧的一种挑战或对国家的报复。

暴力和犯罪渗透到日常生活中，伴随而来的是贫困和匮乏的加剧。总体而言，秘鲁人的实际平均收入在过去十年中稳步下降，目前已回到二十年前的水平。四周垃圾堆积如山。乞丐、洗车工和拾荒者日夜围攻路人，索要钱财。精神病患者赤身裸体地涌上街头，浑身散发着尿臭。儿童、单身母亲和残疾人在每个角落乞讨。

…我们社会传统的中央集权主义显然无法满足转型国家多方面的需要^。24

A complete subversion of ends and means has turned the life of Peruvian society upside down, to the point that there are acts which, although officially criminal, are no longer condemned by the collective consciousness. Smuggling is a case in point. Everyone, from the aristocratic lady to the humblest man, acquires smuggled goods. No one has scruples about it; on the contrary, it is viewed as a kind of challenge to individual ingenuity or as revenge against the state.

This infiltration of violence and criminality into everyday life has been accompanied by increasing poverty and deprivation. In general terms, Peruvians’ real average income had declined steadily over the last ten years and is now at the level of twenty years ago. Mountains of garbage pile up on all sides. Night and day, legions of beggars, car washers, and scavengers besiege passersby, asking for money. The mentally ill swarm naked in the streets, stinking of urine. Children, single mothers, and cripples beg for alms on every corner.

…The traditional centralism of our society has proved clearly incapable of satisfying the manifold needs of a country in transition.²⁴

德索托将藤森关闭国会之前发生的放弃可怕的合法经济、转而依赖黑市的现象描述为“一场看不见的革命”。

De Soto described the abandonment of the grotesque legal economy for the black market that was under way before Fujimori padlocked the congress as “an invisible revolution.”

我们对自由市场的好处持肯定态度，但对法律与金钱一样堕落的社会前景却不那么乐观。德索托在 1993 年之前描述的秘鲁世界是一个“发条橙”世界，过度集中和功能失调的政府机构正在摧毁公民社会。

We are positive about the benefits of the free market, but much less positive about the promise of a society in which the law is as degraded as the money. The world that de Soto described in Peru prior to 1993 was a “Clockwork Orange” world, where overly centralized and dysfunctional government institutions were literally destroying the civil society.

藤森想要改变的正是这些。他通过关闭印钞机削减了通货膨胀。他还设法解雇了五万名政府雇员，削减了一些补贴。他已经开始平衡预算。他的改革方案包括建立自由市场和私有化工业的全面计划。但与前苏联一样，藤森改革的大部分重要内容尚未实现。1993 年通过的法案包括第一轮大规模国有银行、矿业公司和公用事业的私有化。秘鲁国会没有实施这些必要的提案，而是像在莫斯科挑战叶利钦改革的俄罗斯国会一样，试图倒退。他们的计划是：从空虚的国库中恢复补贴，增加工资，保护所有既得利益，尤其是官僚机构——这正是你所期望的由雇员控制的政府。

This is what Fujimori set out to change. He had slashed inflation by turning off the printing presses. He had also managed to fire fifty thousand government employees, and to trim some subsidies. He had made a start toward balancing the budget. His program of reform included comprehensive plans to create free markets and privatize industry. But as in the former Soviet Union, most of the important elements of Fujimori’s reform were yet to be adopted in 1993, including the first round of large-scale privatization of state banks, mining companies, and utilities. Instead of enacting these necessary proposals, Peru’s congress, like the Russian congress that challenged Yeltsin’s reforms in Moscow, sought to move backwards. Their plan: restore subsidies from an empty treasury, pad the payroll, and protect any and all vested interests, especially the bureaucracy—exactly what you would expect of a government controlled by its employees.

藤森声称秘鲁国会优柔寡断、腐败不堪，这一事实几乎得到了所有人的认同。他进一步声称，国会的优柔寡断和腐败使得秘鲁无法改革崩溃的经济，也无法打击毒品恐怖分子和虚无主义的光辉道路游击队的暴力袭击。

Fujimori claimed that the congress of Peru was dithering and corrupt, a fact with which almost everyone agreed. He further claimed that congressional dithering and corruption made it impossible to reform Peru’s collapsing economy or combat a violent assault by narco-terrorists and nihilistic Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) guerrillas.

70% 解决方案

The 70 Percent Solution

因此藤森解散了国会，这一举动可能表明他与许多早期的拉丁美洲领导人一样独裁。但我们认为，并且当时也这么说，藤森正确地指出了改革的一个根本障碍。美国社论作家和国务院官员对秘鲁国会的夸张官方悼念并没有得到秘鲁人民的认同。当北美人继续认为秘鲁国会是自由和文明的化身时，秘鲁人民欢呼雀跃。藤森总统在解散国会后，支持率飙升至 70% 以上。后来，他以压倒性优势再次当选第二任。大多数公民显然认为他们的立法机构是他们福祉的障碍，而不是他们权利的表达。1994 年，秘鲁的实际经济增长率达到 12.9%，为全球最高。

So Fujimori closed the Congress, an act that might have indicated that he was as authoritarian as many earlier Latin American leaders. But we thought, and said so at the time, that Fujimori had correctly identified a fundamental impediment to reform. The extravagant official elegies for the Peruvian congress by American editorial writers and officials of the State Department were not shared by the people of Peru. While North Americans carried on as if Peru’s congress were the incarnation of freedom and civilization, the Peruvian people cheered. President Fujimori’s popularity shot up above 70 percent when he sent the congress home. And he was later reelected to a second term in a landslide. Most citizens apparently saw their legislature more as an obstacle to their well-being than as an expression of their rights, In 1994, real economic growth in Peru reached 12.9 percent, the highest on the planet.

政治承​​诺的兑现

Deflation of Political Promises

我们认为秘鲁的动乱与其说是过去独裁统治的倒退，倒不如说是更广泛的转型危机的早期阶段。随着政治承诺的落空和政府信用的耗尽，许多国家将出现治理不善的危机。最终，必须出现新的制度形式，能够在新的技术条件下维护自由，同时表达和实现所有公民共同的利益。

We saw Peru’s turmoil less as a throwback to the dictatorships of the past than as an early installment of a broader transition crisis. You can expect to see crises of misgovernment in many countries as political promises are deflated and governments run out of credit. Ultimately, new institutional forms will have to emerge that are capable of preserving freedom in the new technological conditions, while at the same time giving expression and life to the common interests that all citizens share.

很少有人开始思考工业政府的一些制度与后工业社会的超级政治之间的不相容性。然而，无论这些矛盾是否得到明确承认，它们的后果都将变得越来越明显，成为世界各地政治失败的现象日益严重。现代时期出现的政府机构反映了一个世纪或几个世纪前的超级政治状况。信息时代需要新的代表机制，以避免长期失灵甚至社会崩溃。

Few have begun to think about the incompatibility between some of the institutions of industrial government and the megapolitics of postindustrial society. Whether these contradictions are explicitly acknowledged or not, however, their consequences will become increasingly obvious as examples of political failure compound around the world. Institutions of government that emerged in the modern period reflect the megapolitical conditions of one or more centuries ago. The Information Age will require new mechanisms of representation to avoid chronic dysfunction and even social collapse.

1989 年柏林墙倒塌不仅标志着冷战的结束，也是世界权力基础无声地震的外在标志。这是长期暴力不断上升时期的结束。早在 1987 年《街头血案》中，甚至更早之前，我们在月刊《战略投资》中就预测到共产主义的垮台，这不仅仅是对一种意识形态的否定。它是过去五个世纪暴力史上最重要发展的外在标志。如果我们的分析是正确的，社会组织必将发生变化，以反映暴力使用中日益增长的规模不经济。未来的界限已被重新划定。

When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, it not only signaled the end of the Cold War; it was also the outer sign of a silent earthquake in the foundations of power in the world. It was the end of the long period of rising returns to violence. The fall of Communism, which we forecast in 1987 in Blood in the Streets and even earlier in our monthly newsletter, Strategic Investment, was not merely the repudiation of an ideology. It was the outward marker of the most important development in the history of violence over the past five centuries. If our analysis is correct, the organization of society is bound to change to reflect growing diseconomies of scale in the employment of violence. The boundaries within which the future must lie have been redrawn.

第六章信息时代的巨型应用 效率战胜权力

CHAPTER 6 THE MEGAPDLITICS OF THE INFORMATIDN AGE The Triumph of Efficiency over Power

“……计算机化信息，而非人力或大规模生产，日益推动着美国经济，并将在一个拥有 500 个电视频道的世界中赢得战争。计算机化信息存在于网络空间中——这是计算机网络、卫星、调制解调器、数据库和公共互联网不断复制所创造的新维度” ¹

—尼尔·门罗

“…it is computerized information, not manpower or mass production, that increasingly drives the U.S. economy and that will win wars in a world wired for 500 TV channels. The computerized information exists in cyberspace—the new dimension created by endless reproduction of computer networks, satellites, modems, databases and the public Internet”¹

—NEIL MUNRO

1936 年 12 月 30 日，为争取更高工资，汽车工人强行占领了通用汽车在密歇根州弗林特的两家主要工厂。他们停工停产，关闭装配线，让自己像在家一样。受雇经营工厂的工人坐下来进行持续数周的劳资冲突。这是一场戏剧性的事件，充斥着暴力骚乱，警察、密歇根民兵和各级政府的政治人物的立场也摇摆不定。工会在强制要求方面没有取得任何进展，于 1937 年 2 月 1 日再次罢工。工会活动家强行接管了通用汽车在弗林特的雪佛兰工厂。通过占领和关闭在通用汽车的关键工厂，工人们有效地瘫痪了公司的生产能力。在第三家工厂被占领后的十天内，通用汽车在美国只生产了153辆汽车。

On December 30, 1936, auto workers angling for higher pay forcibly seized two of General Motors’ main plants at Flint, Michigan. They idled machines, turned off the assembly lines, and made themselves at home. Workers who had been employed to operate the factories sat down in an industrial confrontation that was to last for many weeks. It was a drama punctuated by violent riots and the fluctuating allegiances of the police, the Michigan militia, and political figures at all levels of government. Seeing little progress in forcing their demands, the union struck again on February 1, 1937. Union activists forcibly took over GM’s Chevrolet factory in Flint. By occupying and closing General Motors’ key factories, the workers effectively paralyzed the company’s productive capacity. In the ten days following the seizure of the third plant, GM produced only 153 automobiles in the United States.

我们重温 60 年前的这则新闻，以便更清楚地了解目前正在发生的超级政治条件下的革命。通用汽车的静坐罢工发生在本书部分读者的有生之年。然而，我们认为静坐罢工在信息时代将被证明是过时的，就像奴隶拖着巨石跋涉穿越沙漠为法老建造葬礼金字塔一样。虽然工会及其恐吓策略在工业时代变得如此常见，以至于成为社会景观中不容置疑的一部分，但它们依赖于正在迅速消失的特殊超级政治条件。信息高速公路上不会有雪佛兰和 UAW 罢工。

We revisit this news flash from sixty years ago to place the revolution in megapolitical conditions now under way into clearer perspective. The GM sitdown strike happened within the lifetimes of some readers of this book. Yet we believe that sit-down strikes will prove as anachronistic in the Information Age as slaves slogging across the desert with giant stones in tow to erect funeral pyramids for the pharaohs. While labor unions and their tactics of intimidation became so familiar in the industrial period as to be an unquestioned part of the social landscape, they depended upon special megapolitical conditions that are rapidly fading away. There will be no Chevrolets and no UAW to strike on the Information Superhighway.

政府的命运将追随工会的命运，走向衰落。在二十世纪社会中发挥了关键作用的制度化胁迫将不复存在。技术正在促使敲诈勒索和保护的逻辑发生深刻变化。

The fortunes of governments will follow those of their counterparts, the unions, into decline. Institutionalized coercion of the kind that played a crucial role in twentieth-century society will no longer be possible. Technology is precipitating a profound change in the logic of extortion and protection.

“…不存在任何礼仪，不存在任何统治，不存在任何我的和你的分别；只有每个人能够得到的，并且能够保留多久就保留多久。” ²

—托马斯·霍布斯

“… there be no Propriety, no Dominion, no Mine and Thine distinct; but only that to be every man’s that he can get; and for so long, as he can keep it.”²

—THOMAS HOBBES

敲诈勒索和保护

Extortion and Protection

纵观历史，暴力一直是指向经济心脏的匕首。正如托马斯·谢林敏锐地指出的那样：“伤害的力量——摧毁某人珍视的东西，造成痛苦和悲伤——是一种讨价还价的力量，不容易使用，但经常使用。在黑社会，它是敲诈、勒索和绑架的基础，在商业世界，它是抵制、罢工和停工的基础……它往往是纪律的基础，无论是民事还是军事；神灵用它来严格纪律。” ³政府的征税能力最终取决于与私人敲诈勒索相同的弱点。虽然我们往往不这样认为，但通过犯罪和政府强制控制和花费的资产比例，粗略衡量了勒索和保护之间的政治平衡。如果技术使资产保护变得困难，犯罪就会趋于普遍，工会活动也会如此。在这种情况下，政府的保护将因此得到重视。税收会很高。税收较低的地方并且工作场所的工资率是由市场力量而不是通过政治干预或强制决定的，技术已经使平衡倾向于保护。

Throughout history, violence has been a dagger pointed at the heart of the economy. As Thomas Schelling shrewdly put it, “The power to hurt—to destroy things that somebody treasures, to inflict pain and grief—is a kind of bargaining power, not easy to use but used often. In the underworld it is the basis for blackmail, extortion, and kidnapping, in the commercial world, for boycotts, strikes, and lockouts.… It is often the basis for discipline, civilian and military; and gods use it to exact discipline.”³ A government’s capacity to tax ultimately depends upon the same vulnerabilities as do private shakedowns and extortion. Although we tend not to perceive it in these terms, the proportion of assets that are controlled and spent coercively, through crime and government, provides a rough measure of the megapolitical balance between extortion and protection. If technology made the protection of assets difficult, crime would tend to be widespread, and so would union activity. Under such circumstances, protection by government would therefore command a premium. Taxes would be high. Where taxes are lower and wage rates in the workplace are determined by market forces rather than through political intervention or coercion, technology has tipped the balance toward protection.

敲诈勒索和保护之间的技术不平衡在 20 世纪的后 25 年达到了极点。在一些发达的西方社会，政府占用了超过大部分的资源。很大一部分人口的收入要么由法令规定，要么在胁迫的影响下决定，例如罢工和其他形式的暴力威胁。福利国家和工会都是技术的产物，分享了 20 世纪权力战胜效率的战利品。如果不是军用和民用技术在工业时代提高了暴力的回报，它们就不可能存在。

The technological imbalance between extortion and protection reached an extreme at the end of the third quarter of the twentieth century. In some advanced Western societies more than a majority of resources were commandeered by governments. The incomes of a large fraction of the population were either set by fiat or determined under the influence of coercion, such as by strikes and threats of violence in other forms. The welfare state and the trade union were both artifacts of technology, sharing the spoils of the triumph of power over efficiency in the twentieth century. They could not have existed if not for the technologies, military and civilian, that raised the returns to violence during the Industrial Age.

创造资产的能力总是意味着某种程度的勒索风险。创造或拥有的资产越多，付出的代价就越高，不管怎样。要么你贿赂所有获得使用暴力敲诈手段的人，要么你花钱购买能够挫败任何暴力勒索企图的军事力量。

The capacity to create assets has always entailed some vulnerability to extortion. The greater the assets created or possessed, the higher the price to be paid, in one way or another. Either you paid off everyone who gained the leverage to employ violence for extortion, or you paid for military power capable of defeating any shakedown attempt by brute force.

“你的土地上不再听到暴力，你的边界内不再有浪费和毁灭......”

—赛亚书60:18

“Violence shall no more be heard in thy land, wasting nor destruction within thy borders…”

—ISAIAH 60:18

保护的数学

The Mathematics of Protection

现在，暴力的利刃可能很快就会被钝化。信息技术有望极大地改变保护与勒索之间的平衡，在许多情况下，保护资产变得更容易，勒索则更加困难。信息时代的技术使得创造许多胁迫手段无法触及的资产成为可能。保护与勒索之间的这种新的不对称基于数学的一个基本事实。乘法比除法容易。然而，尽管这个事实很基本，但它的深远影响在微处理器出现之前就被掩盖了。在过去十年中，高速计算机进行的计算比世界历史上进行的计算多出数十亿倍。计算的飞跃使我们首次能够理解复杂性的一些普遍特征。计算机表明，复杂系统只能自下而上地构建和理解。乘以素数很简单。但试图分解大量乘积来分解复杂性却很难。质数几乎是不可能的。《连线》杂志的编辑凯文·凯利这样说道：“将几个质数相乘得到一个更大的乘积很容易；任何小学生都可以做到。但世界上的超级计算机在试图将乘积分解成简单的质数时却无法做到。” ⁴

Now the dagger of violence could soon be blunted. Information technology promises to alter dramatically the balance between protection and extortion, making protection of assets in many cases much easier, and extortion more difficult. The technology of the Information Age makes it possible to create assets that are outside the reach of many forms of coercion. This new asymmetry between protection and extortion rests upon a fundamental truth of mathematics. It is easier to multiply than to divide. As basic as this truth is, however, its far-reaching consequences were disguised prior to the advent of microprocessors. High-speed computers have facilitated many billions of times more computations in the past decade than were undertaken in all the previous history of the world. This leap in computation has allowed us for the first time to fathom some of the universal characteristics of complexity. What the computers show is that complex systems can be built and understood only from the bottom up. Multiplying prime numbers is simple. But disaggregating complexity by trying to decompose the product of large prime numbers is all but impossible. Kevin Kelly, editor of Wired, puts it this way: “To multiply several prime numbers into a larger product is easy; any elementary school kid can do it. But the world’s supercomputers choke while trying to unravel a product into its simple primes.”⁴

复杂系统的逻辑

The Logic of Complex Systems

网络经济必然会受到这一深奥的数学真理的影响。它已经在强大的加密算法中得到了明显的体现。正如我们在本章后面所探讨的那样，这些算法将允许创建一个新的、受保护的网络商务领域，其中暴力的杠杆作用将大大降低。敲诈勒索和保护之间的平衡将大大倾向于保护。这将促进一种更多地依赖自发适应机制而不是通过官僚机构进行有意识的决策和资源分配的经济的出现。以保护为首的新系统将与工业时期强制主导的体系截然不同。

The cybereconomy will inevitably be shaped by this profound mathematical truth. It already has an obvious expression in powerful encryption algorithms. As we explore later in this chapter, these algorithms will allow the creation of a new, protected realm of cybercommerce in which the leverage of violence will be greatly reduced. The balance between extortion and protection will tip dramatically in the direction of protection. This will facilitate the emergence of an economy that depends more upon spontaneous adaptive mechanisms and less upon conscious decision-making and resource allocation through bureaucracy. The new system in which protection will be at the forefront will be very different from that which arose from the predominance of compulsion in the industrial period.

指挥控制系统很原始

Command-and-Control Systems Are Primitive

我们在《大清算》一书中写道，计算机使我们能够“看到”一系列系统中过去不可见的复杂性。先进的计算能力^不仅使我们能够更好地理解复杂系统的动态，还使我们能够以富有成效的方式驾驭这些复杂性。从某种意义上说，如果经济要超越僵化的中央控制发展阶段，这甚至不是一种选择，而是一种必然。这种依赖于线性关系的系统从根本上来说是原始的。政府拨款不可避免地会将资源从高价值的复杂用途转移到低价值的原始用途。这一过程受到数学不对称的限制，这种不对称阻止了大素数乘积的解开。分赃永远都是原始的。

We wrote in The Great Reckoning that the computer is enabling us to “see” the formerly invisible complexity inherent in a whole range of systems.^I Not only does advanced computational capability enable us to better understand the dynamics of complex systems; it also enables us to harness those complexities in productive ways. In a sense, this is not even a choice but an inevitability if the economy is to advance beyond the inflexible central-control stage of development. Such a system, which depends upon linear relationships, is fundamentally primitive. Government appropriation inevitably dragoons resources from high-value complex uses to low-value primitive uses. It is a process that is limited by the same mathematical asymmetry that prevents the unraveling of the product of large prime numbers. Dividing the spoils can never be anything but primitive.

一切都变得更加复杂

Everything Gets More Complex

放眼宇宙，你会发现系统在演化过程中变得越来越复杂。天体物理学也是如此。水坑也是如此。如果将雨水留在低洼处，它就会变得更加复杂。各种先进系统都是复杂的自适应系统，没有权威机构负责。自然界中每个复杂系统都依赖于分散的能力，市场经济就是其中最明显的社会表现。在最广泛的条件下最有效地工作的系统依赖于自发秩序的弹性，这种秩序可以适应新的可能性。生命本身就是一个如此复杂的系统。数十亿种潜在的基因组合造就了一个人类个体。对它们进行分类会让任何官僚机构都感到困惑。

Everywhere you look in the universe, you see systems attaining greater complexity as they evolve. This is true in astrophysics. It is true in a puddle. Leave rainwater alone in a low spot and it will grow more complex. Advanced systems of every variety are complex adaptive systems without an authority in charge. Every complex system in nature, of which the market economy is the most evident social manifestation, depends upon dispersed capabilities. Systems that work most effectively under the widest range of conditions depend for their resilience upon spontaneous order that accommodates novel possibilities. Life itself is such a complex system. Billions of potential combinations of genes produce a single human individual. Sorting among them would confound any bureaucracy.

25 年前，这只能是一种直觉。而今天，它已得到证实。计算机越能让我们理解人工生命的数学原理，我们就越能理解真实生命的数学原理，也就是生物复杂性的数学原理。这些复杂性的秘密通过信息技术得以利用，使经济体得以重新配置为更复杂的形式。正如凯文·凯利在《失控：机器、社会系统和经济世界的新生物学》一书中所言，互联网和万维网已经呈现出有机系统的特征。5用^凯文·凯利的话来说，大自然是“一个创意工厂。每一个丛林蚁丘中都隐藏着重要的后工业范式……生物逻辑全面转移到机器中应该让我们感到敬畏。当生与造的结合完成时，我们的制造物将学习、适应、自我修复和进化。这是我们几乎从未梦想过的力量。” ⁶

Twenty-five years ago, that could only have been an intuition. Today it is demonstrable. The closer computers bring us to understanding the mathematics of artificial life, the better we understand the mathematics of real life, which are those of biological complexity. These secrets of complexity, harnessed through information technology, are allowing economies to be reconfigured into more complex forms. The Internet and the World Wide Web have already taken on characteristics of an organic system, as Kevin Kelly suggests in Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World.⁵ In his words, nature is “an idea factory. Vital, postindustrial paradigms are hidden in every jungly ant hill.… The wholesale transfer of bio-logic into machines should fill us with awe. When the union of the born and the made is complete, our fabrications will learn, adapt, heal themselves, and evolve. This is a power we have hardly dreamt of yet.”⁶

事实上，“将生物逻辑全面转移到机器中”的后果必将影响深远。社会系统总是强烈地倾向于模仿当前技术的特征。马克思的这一观点是正确的。巨型工厂与大政府时代相吻合。微处理正在使机构小型化。如果我们的分析是正确的，信息时代的技术最终将创造出一种更适合利用复杂性优势的经济。

Indeed, the consequences of the “wholesale transfer of bio-logic into machines” are bound to be far-reaching. There has always been a strong tendency for social systems to mimic the characteristics of prevailing technology. This is something that Marx got right. Gigantic factories coincided with the age of big government. Microprocessing is miniaturizing institutions. If our analysis is correct, the technology of the Information Age will ultimately create an economy better suited to exploit the advantages of complexity.

然而，人们对这种变化的超级政治维度了解甚少，甚至大多数认识到其数学重要性的人也以一种不合时宜的方式认识到了这一点。很难完全理解和内化未来几年的技术变革将取代现代世界大多数政治形式和概念的可能性。例如，已故物理学家海因茨·佩格尔斯（Heinz Pagels）在其远见卓识的著作《理性之梦》中写道： “我确信，掌握复杂性这一新科学的国家和人民将成为下个世纪的经济、文化和政治超级大国。” ⁷这是一个令人印象深刻的预测。但我们认为它注定是错误的，不是因为它被误解了，而恰恰是因为它将被证明比佩格尔斯博士敢于表达的更正确。重新配置自己以变得更加复杂的社会适应性系统确实会繁荣昌盛。但即使繁荣昌盛，它们也不太可能成为国家，更不可能成为“政治超级大国”。社会系统复杂性的增加更有可能直接受益于新千年的主权个体。

Yet the megapolitical dimensions of such a change are so little understood that even most of those who have recognized its mathematical importance have done so in an anachronistic way. It is simply difficult to grasp and internalize fully the likelihood that technological change in the next few years will antiquate most of the political forms and concepts of the modern world. For example, the late physicist Heinz Pagels wrote in his farseeing book, The Dreams of Reason, “I am convinced that the nations and people who master the new science of Complexity will become the economic, cultural, and political superpowers of the next century.”⁷ It is an impressive forecast. But we believe it is bound to be wrong, not because it is misperceived, but precisely because it will prove more right than Dr. Pagels dared to express. Societies that reconfigure themselves to become more complex adaptive systems will indeed prosper. But when they do, they are unlikely to be nations, much less “political superpowers.” The more likely immediate beneficiaries of increased complexity of social systems will be the Sovereign Individuals of the new millennium.

按照佩格尔斯的预测，这相当于五百代以前狩猎部落的巫师在围坐在篝火旁时告诉他的部落成员，“我相信，第一个掌握灌溉种植新科学的狩猎部落将比那些在湖边捕捞大鱼的人有更多的空闲时间讲故事。”尽管佩格尔斯对复杂性的重要性的看法是正确的，但他忽略了最基本的事实。当暴力的逻辑发生变化时，社会就会发生变化。

As Pagels’s forecast stands, it is the equivalent to a shaman of a hunting band of five hundred generations ago telling his men as they crouched around the campfire, “I am convinced that the first hunting band to master the new science of irrigated planting will have more free time for storytelling than even those guys over at the lake who catch the big fish.” As right as he was about the importance of complexity, Pagels overlooked the most basic fact of all. When the logic of violence changes, society changes.

暴力的逻辑​​​

THE LOGIC OF VIOLENCE

要了解原因和过程，有必要关注极少引起人们注意的几个大政治方面。这些问题是历史学家弗雷德里克·C·莱恩 (Frederic C. Lane) 探讨过的，他关于暴力和战争经济意义的著作在本卷其他部分进行了讨论。莱恩在本世纪中叶写作时，信息社会还遥不可及。在这种情况下，他很可能认为，随着民族国家的出现，世界上使用暴力的竞争已经进入了最后阶段。他的作品中没有暗示他预见了微处理，也没有暗示他相信在网络空间（一个没有物理存在的领域）创造资产在技术上是可行的。莱恩没有谈到大量商业活动几乎不受暴力影响的可能性。

To see how and why, it is necessary to focus on several facets of megapolitics that are seldom brought to your attention. These are issues that were explored by historian Frederic C. Lane, whose work on violence and the economic meaning of war is discussed elsewhere in this volume. When Lane wrote in the middle of this century, the Information Society was nowhere in sight. Under the circumstances, he may well have supposed that the competition to employ violence in the world had reached its final stage with the appearance of the nation-state. There is no hint in his works that he anticipated microprocessing or believed that it was technologically feasible to create assets in cyberspace, a realm without physical existence. Lane had nothing to say about the implications of the possibility that large amounts of commerce could be made all but immune from the leverage of violence.

虽然莱恩没有预见到现在正在展开的技术革命，但他对过去暴力垄断各个阶段的洞察是如此清晰，以至于它们显然适用于新兴的信息革命。莱恩对中世纪暴力世界的研究引起了他对传统经济学家和历史学家往往忽视的问题的关注。他看到，暴力的组织和控制方式在决定“稀缺资源的用途”方面发挥着重要作用。8^莱恩还认识到，虽然暴力的产生通常不被视为经济产出的一部分，但对暴力的控制对经济至关重要。政府的主要作用是提供针对暴力的保护。正如他所说，

While Lane did not foresee the technological revolutions now unfolding, his insights into the various stages of the monopolization of violence in the past were so lucid that they have obvious application to the emerging Information Revolution. Lane’s study of the violent medieval world attracted his attention to issues that conventional economists and historians have tended to neglect. He saw that how violence is organized and controlled plays a large role in determining “what uses are made of scarce resources.”⁸ Lane also recognized that while production of violence is not usually considered part of economic output, the control of violence is crucial to the economy. The primary role of government is to provide protection against violence. As he put it,

每一个经济企业都需要并支付保护费用，保护其资本免遭破坏或武装扣押，保护其劳动力免遭强行破坏。在高度组织化的社会中，这种效用（保护）的生产是这是政府这一特殊团体或机构的职能之一。事实上，政府最显著的特征之一就是他们试图通过使用武力来建立法律和秩序，并通过各种手段控制他人使用武力。” ⁹

Every economic enterprise needs and pays for protection, protection against the destruction or armed seizure of its capital and the forceful disruption of its labor. In highly organized societies the production of this utility, protection, is one of the functions of a special association or enterprise called government. Indeed, one of the most distinctive characteristics of governments is their attempt to create law and order by using force themselves and by controlling through various means the use of force by others.”⁹

这一点显然太过基本，无法出现在教科书中，也无法成为可能决定政治进程的公民讨论的一部分。但如果你想了解正在展开的信息革命，这一点也太过基本，不容忽视。保护生命和财产确实是每个社会都面临的迫切需求。如何抵御暴力侵略是历史上的核心难题。尽管可以通过多种方式提供保护，但这个问题很难解决。

That is a point that is apparently too basic to appear in textbooks, or to form a part of the civic discussion that presumably determines the course of politics. But it is also too basic to ignore if you wish to understand the unfolding Information Revolution. Protection of life and property is indeed a crucial need that has bedeviled every society that ever existed. How to fend off violent aggression is history’s central dilemma. It cannot easily be solved, notwithstanding the fact that protection can be provided in more than one way.

一个时代的终结

The Close of an Age

在我们写作时，信息时代的超级政治后果才刚刚开始显现。近几十年来，经济的变化已经从制造业的主导地位转变为信息和计算的主导地位，从机器力量转变为微处理，从工厂转变为工作站，从大规模生产转变为小团队，甚至转变为个人单独工作。随着企业规模的缩小，工作场所发生破坏和敲诈的可能性也随之减小。工会更难组织规模较小的企业。

As we write, the megapolitical consequences of the Information Age are only beginning to be felt. The economic change of recent decades has been from the primacy of manufactures to that of information and computation, from machine power to microprocessing, from factory to workstation, from mass production to small teams, or even to persons working alone. As the scale of enterprise falls, so does the potential for sabotage and blackmail in the workplace. Smaller-scale operations are much more difficult to organize by unions.

微技术使企业可以成为更小、更自由的目标。许多企业经营的服务或产品几乎不含自然资源。原则上，这些企业可以在地球上的任何地方开展业务。它们不会被困在矿山或港口等特定地点。因此，随着时间的推移，它们将更不容易受到工会或政客的征税。中国有句古老的民间谚语说：“三十六条脱困之道，最好的一条是——离开。” ¹⁰

Microtechnology allows firms to be smaller, more footloose targets. Many deal in services or products with negligible natural-resource content. In principle, these businesses could be conducted almost anywhere on the planet. They are not trapped at a specific location, like a mine or a port. Therefore, in the fullness of time, they will be far less susceptible to being taxed, either by unions or by politicians. An old Chinese folk wisdom holds, “Of all the thirty-six ways to get out of trouble, the best way is—leave.”¹⁰

在信息时代，这种东方智慧将很容易应用。如果由于一个地方的需求过大而导致运营不顺畅，那么转移将容易得多。事实上，正如我们下面所探讨的，在信息时代，可以创建虚拟公司，其在任何司法管辖区的注册地将完全取决于现货市场。政府或其他方敲诈勒索的程度一夜之间增加，可能会导致虚拟公司的活动和资产以光速逃离司法管辖区。

In the Information Age, that Oriental wisdom will be easily applied. If operations become uncomfortable due to excessive demands in one location, it will be far easier to move. Indeed, as we explore below, it will be possible in the Information Age to create virtual corporations whose domicile in any jurisdiction will be entirely contingent on the spot market. An overnight increase in the degree of attempted extortion, either by governments or others, could lead to the activities and assets of the virtual corporation fleeing the jurisdiction at the speed of light.

微技术日益融入工业流程意味着，即使那些仍然经营规模经济的制成品企业也不再那么容易受到暴力手段的威胁情况已经大不如前。美国汽车工人联合会对卡特彼勒的长期罢工以失败告终就是一个例证，这场罢工持续了近两年，最终于 1995 年末结束。与 20 世纪 30 年代的装配线不同，如今的卡特彼勒工厂雇佣的技术工人多得多。在国外竞争的压力下，卡特彼勒将大量低技能工作外包出去，关闭了效率低下的工厂，并花费近 20 亿美元将机床计算机化并安装装配机器人。甚至罢工本身也有助于提高节省劳动力的效率。该公司声称，现在所需的员工数量比罢工开始时减少了 2000 人^。11

The growing integration of microtechnology into industrial processes means that even those firms that still deal in manufactured products with great economies of scale are no longer as vulnerable to the leverage of violence as they once were. An example illustrating this point is the collapse of the United Auto Workers union’s lengthy strike against Caterpillar, which was called off in the waning days of 1995 after almost two years. Unlike the assembly lines of the 1930s, today’s Caterpillar plant employs far more skilled workers. Pressed by foreign competition, Caterpillar farmed out much of its low-skill work, closed inefficient plants, and spent almost $2 billion computerizing machine tools and installing assembly robots. Even the strike itself helped spur labor-saving efficiencies. The company now claims to need two thousand fewer employees than when the walkout began.¹¹

生产过程的超级政治已经发生了比大多数人意识到的更为剧烈的变化。这种变化目前还不明显，部分原因是超级政治条件的革命与其必然引发的制度变革之间总是存在滞后。此外，微处理技术的快速发展意味着，一些产品即将面世，它们对超级政治的影响甚至在它们出现之前就可以预见。它们将创造一个截然不同的世界。

The megapolitics of the production process has altered more drastically than most people realize. This change is not yet clearly visible, partly because there is always a lag between a revolution in megapolitical conditions and the institutional changes it inevitably precipitates. Further, the rapid evolution of microprocessing technology means that products are now on the horizon whose megapolitical consequences can be anticipated even before they exist. They will make for a far different world.

工人对资本家的剥削​

EXPLOITATION OF THE CAPITALISTS BY THE WORKERS

二十世纪大部分时间的技术特征使得强行夺取工厂或静坐罢工成为业主或管理者难以应对的策略。正如历史学家罗伯特·S·麦克尔维恩所说，静坐罢工“使得雇主很难在不破坏自己的设备的情况下破坏罢工”。12^实际上，工人们实际上扣押了业主的资本作为赎金。由于我们将在下文探讨的原因，大型工业公司比小型公司更容易成为工会利用的目标。1937 年，通用汽车可能是世界上领先的工业公司。它的工厂是有史以来规模最大、成本最高的机械组装厂之一，雇用了数千名工人。通用汽车工厂被迫停工的每一小时、每一天都会给公司带来一笔不小的损失。像 1936-37 年冬天那样持续数周的罢工意味着损失迅速增加。

The character of technology through most of the twentieth century made the forcible seizure of a factory, or a sit-down, strike, a hard tactic for owners or managers to counter. As historian Robert S. McElvaine put it, a sit-down strike “made it difficult for employers to break the strike without doing the same to their own equipment.”¹² In effect, the workers physically held the owners’ capital to ransom. For reasons we explore below, larger industrial companies proved easier targets for unions to exploit than smaller firms. In 1937, General Motors was perhaps the leading industrial corporation in the world. Its factories were among the largest and most costly aggregations of machinery ever assembled, employing many thousands of workers. Every hour, every day that the GM plants were forced to sit idle cost the company a small fortune. A strike that remained unsettled for weeks, like that in the winter of 1936-37, meant rapidly ballooning losses.

违背供求关系

Defying Supply and Demand

在第三家工厂被占领后，通用汽车无法生产汽车，很快就向工会投降了。这几乎不是一个基于劳动力供需的经济决策。远非如此。当通用汽车同意工会的要求时，美国有 900 万人失业，占劳动力的 14%。大多数失业者很乐意接受通用汽车的工作。他们当然有能力胜任流水线工作，尽管你可能从大多数当代记载中不知道这一点。工业时期劳资关系的直接分析被一种微妙的礼节所笼罩。它的一个借口是，工厂工作，特别是二十世纪中叶的工作，是技术性工作。这是不正确的。大多数工厂工作几乎可以由任何能按时上班的人完成。他们几乎不需要培训，甚至不需要读写能力。就在 20 世纪 80 年代，通用汽车的大部分劳动力要么是文盲，要么是数学天才，要么两者兼而有之。直到 20 世纪 90 年代，通用汽车的典型流水线工人在上流水线之前只接受过一天的入职培训。一天就能学会的工作不算是技术性工作。

Unable to produce automobiles after the seizure of its third plant, GM soon capitulated to the union. This was hardly an economic decision based upon the supply and demand for labor. Far from it. When General Motors acceded to the union demands there were nine million persons unemployed in the United States, 14 percent of the workforce. Most of those without work would gladly have taken jobs at GM. They certainly had the skills to fill assembly-line jobs, although you might not know this from most contemporary accounts. A delicate etiquette shrouded straightforward analysis of labor relations during the industrial period. One of its pretenses was the idea that factory jobs, particularly in the middle of the twentieth century, were skilled work. This was untrue. Most factory jobs could have been performed by almost anyone capable of showing up on time. They required little or no training, not even the ability to read or write. As recently as the 1980s, large fractions of the General Motors workforce were either illiterate, innumerate, or both. Until the 1990s, the typical assembly-line worker at GM received only one day of orientation before taking his place on the assembly line. A job you can learn in a single day is not skilled work.

然而，在 1937 年，当非技术工人和技术工人都排队乞求工作时，通用汽车工厂的工人却能够迫使雇主加薪。他们的成功更多地与暴力动态有关，而不是与劳动力的供求关系有关。1937 年 3 月，即通用汽车冲突解决后的一个月，美国又发生了 170 起静坐罢工。大多数都取得了成功。每个工业化国家都发生了类似的事件。工人们只是占领了工厂，然后把它们赎回给业主。这是一种非常简单的策略，在大多数情况下，参与者既有利可图又很有趣。一位静坐罢工者写道：“我玩得很开心，有新鲜、不同的东西，有很多食物和音乐。” ¹³

Yet in 1937, with unskilled and skilled workers alike lined up begging for jobs, GM factory workers were able to coerce their employers into a pay hike. Their success had much more to do with the dynamics of violence than with the supply and demand for labor. In March 1937, the month following the settlement of the GM confrontation, there were 170 more sit-down strikes in the United States. Most were successful. Similar episodes occurred in every industrialized country. The workers simply seized the factories and ransomed them back to the owners. It was a tactic of great simplicity, and one that in most cases was profitable and fun for those participating. One sit-down striker wrote, “I am having a great time, something new, something different, lots of grub and music.”¹³

1936-37 年的通用汽车静坐罢工和当时其他的强行占领工厂事件，都是我们在《血染街头》中所描述的“工人剥削资本家”现象的例子。这并不是皮特·西格在他的悲伤歌曲中所表达的观点。但除非你打算在蓝领社区从事民谣歌手的职业，否则重点不是流行的解释，而是潜在的现实。无论你回顾历史，通常都会发现一层合理化和虚构的谎言，掩盖了任何系统性勒索的真正政治基础。如果你只看表面的合理化，你就不可能理解真正发生的事情。

The GM sit-down strike of 1936-37 and the other forcible plant seizures of the time were examples of a phenomenon we described in Blood in the Streets as “the exploitation of the capitalists by the workers.” This was not the view that Pete Seeger set to music in his sad songs. But unless you are planning a career as a folk singer in a blue-collar neighborhood the important thing to focus on is not the popular interpretation but the underlying reality. Wherever you look in history there is generally a layer of rationalization and make-believe that disguises the true megapolitical foundations of any systematic extortion. If you take the rationalizations at face value, you are unlikely to grasp what is really going on.

解密敲诈勒索的逻辑​​

DECIPHERING THE LOGIC OF EXTORTION

要认识到当前向信息时代转变的超级政治影响，你必须剥去那些空谈，关注社会暴力的真正逻辑。这就像剥去熟透的洋葱的外皮。这可能会让你流泪，但不要把目光移开。我们首先研究工作场所敲诈勒索的逻辑，然后将分析扩展到更广泛的领域涉及资产的创造和保护以及现代政府性质的问题。政府的繁荣与工会的繁荣一样，与敲诈勒索的杠杆直接相关，其程度远超大多数人的想象。这种杠杆在十九世纪比二十世纪低得多。在下一个千年，它将几乎降到零点。

To recognize the megapolitical implications of the current shift to the Information Age, you have to strip away the cant and focus on the real logic of violence in society. This is like stripping away the layers of an overripe onion. It may bring tears to your eyes, but don’t look away. We first examine the logic of extortion in the workplace, then extend the analysis to broader issues involving the creation and protection of assets, and the nature of modern government. To a greater degree than most people imagine, the prosperity of government, like that of unions, was directly correlated to the leverage available for extortion. That leverage was much lower in the nineteenth century than in the twentieth. In the next millennium, it will fall almost to the vanishing point.

政府的整个逻辑和权力的性质都因微处理而发生了改变。乍一想，这似乎有些夸张。但仔细观察就会发现，20 世纪政府的繁荣与工会的繁荣齐头并进。本世纪之前，大多数政府占用的资源远少于我们已经习以为常的激进福利国家。同样，本世纪之前，工会在经济生活中只是微不足道的因素。工人迫使雇主支付高于市场工资的能力取决于同样的超级政治条件，正是这种条件让政府能够从经济产出中抽取 40% 或更多的税收。

The whole logic of government and the character of power have been transformed by microprocessing. This may seem exaggerated when you first think about it. But look closely. The prosperity of governments has gone hand in hand with the prosperity of labor unions in the twentieth century. Before this century, most governments commandeered far fewer resources than the militant welfare states to which we have become accustomed. Likewise, unions were small or insignificant factors in economic life prior to this century. The ability of workers to coerce their employers into paying above-market wages depended upon the same megapolitical conditions that allowed governments to extract 40 percent or more of the economy's output in taxes.

20世纪之前的职场敲诈勒索

Workplace Extortion Before the Twentieth Century

工会敲诈资本家的兴衰可以用生产过程不断变化的政治格局来解释。1776 年，亚当·斯密出版《国富论》时，工作场所的敲诈条件十分不利，工人“联合起来”来“提高劳动力价格”的行为很少能站得住脚。大多数制造公司规模都很小，由家庭经营。大规模的工业活动才刚刚开始出现。这并不排除暴力的机会，但暴力的影响力却很小。事实上，在斯密的时代以及十九世纪，工会在英国、美国和其他普通法国家通常被视为非法联合。亚当·斯密这样描述罢工企图：“他们通常的借口有时是食品价格高昂；有时是他们的主人通过他们的工作赚取的巨额利润……他们总是诉诸最响亮的喧嚣，有时甚至诉诸最令人震惊的暴力和暴行。” ¹⁴尽管如此，工人们“很少从这些混乱的联合中获得任何好处”，除了“惩罚或毁灭那些头目” ^。15

The rise and fall of union extortion of the capitalists can be readily explained by the changing megapolitics of the production process. In 1776, when Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations, conditions for extortion in the workplace were sufficiently unfavorable that “combinations” by workmen “to raise the price of their labour” were seldom tenable. Most manufacturing firms were tiny and family-run. Larger-scale industrial activities were just beginning to emerge. This did not rule out opportunities for violence, but it gave them little leverage. Indeed, during Smith’s time and well into the nineteenth century, unions were generally considered illegal combinations in the Great Britain, the United States, and other common-law countries. Adam Smith described attempted strikes in these terms: “Their usual pretences are sometimes the high price of provisions; sometimes the great profit which their master make by their work.…[T]hey have always recourse to the loudest clamour, and sometimes to the most shocking violence and outrage.” ¹⁴ Nonetheless, the workmen “very seldom derive any advantage of those tumultuous combinations,” except “the punishment or ruin of the ringleaders.”¹⁵

^{十九世纪，}工业和企业规模的规模经济不断增长。然而，大多数人仍然以农民或小业主的身份为自己工作，而像亚当·斯密所描述的那样，工会组织工作仍然“通常以失败告终”。16工会的法律和政治地位只是随着企业规模的扩大而改变。第一个成功组织起来的工会是高技能工人的行业工会，他们通常不会大规模组织起来。他们倾向于满足于与替换他们的边际成本相匹配的工资增长。非技术工人的工会则是另一回事。他们倾向于利用向更大规模公司的转变，将那些特别容易受到胁迫的行业挑出来组织起来，这些行业要么是规模较大，要么是经营性质使其所有者面临人身破坏。从纽卡斯尔到阿根廷，这种模式都得到了证实^。17

Scale economies in industry and firm size grew during the nineteenth century. Yet most individuals continued to work for themselves as farmers or small proprietors, and union organizing efforts, like those described by Adam Smith, continued to “generally end in nothing.”¹⁶ The legal and political standing of unions changed only as the scale of enterprise rose. The first unions that succeeded in organizing were craft unions of highly skilled workers, who normally organized without extensive violence. They tended to settle for wage increases that matched the marginal costs of replacing them. Unions for unskilled workers were another story. They tended to exploit the shift to firms of larger scale by singling out for organizing efforts precisely those industries that were especially vulnerable to coercion, either because they operated at a larger scale or the character of the operations exposed their owners to physical sabotage. This pattern was borne out from Newcastle to Argentina.¹⁷

美国早期暴力劳工运动的一个典型例子是 1834 年对切萨皮克和俄亥俄运河的袭击。与大多数 19 世纪早期的企业不同，切萨皮克和俄亥俄运河并非一项受控制且易于保护的运营。按照最初的计划，它绵延 342 英里，从波托马克河下游到俄亥俄河上游有 3,000 英尺的上升高度。18^挖掘这样的沟渠是一项从未完全完成的大工程。尽管如此，还是有大量工人试图完成这项工作，其中一些人很快就意识到运河很容易瘫痪。事实上，如果没有定期维护，麝鼠可能会在纤道下挖洞破坏运河。在运营中，运河的船闸和水道可能仅仅因为使用不当、暴雨造成的洪水或未拖船的撞击而遭到破坏。罢工者用沉船或其他碎片堵塞水道是轻而易举的事。 1834 年初，切萨皮克和俄亥俄运河上的爱尔兰工人敌对帮派发生暴乱，导致有人试图利用这一优势夺取运河。然而，在安德鲁·杰克逊总统从麦克亨利堡派遣联邦军队驱散工人后，这一行动失败，造成五人死亡。

An early example of violent labor movements in the United States was an attack on the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal in 1834. Unlike most early-nineteenth-century businesses, the C&O Canal was not a contained and easily protected operation. As originally planned, it was to have stretched 342 miles, with a 3,000-foot rise from the lower Potomac to the upper Ohio.¹⁸ Digging such a ditch was a big job that never quite got completed. Nonetheless, a large number of workers were employed trying to do it, some of whom were not long in recognizing that the canal could be easily incapacitated. Indeed, without regular maintenance, it could be sabotaged by muskrats burrowing under the towpath. In operation, the canal’s locks and channels could be ruined simply by careless use, floods from heavy rains, or battering by untowed boats. It was a simple matter for strikers to blockade the waterway with sunken boats or other debris. In early 1834, rioting among rival gangs of Irish workers on the C&O led to an attempt to make good this potential and seize the canal. The effort failed, however, leaving five persons dead, after President Andrew Jackson sent federal troops from Ft. McHenry to disperse the workers.

矿山和铁路也是美国工会早期活动的首选目标。与切萨皮克和俄亥俄运河一样，它们也极易遭到破坏。例如，矿山可能会被淹没，或入口被封锁。仅仅杀死将矿车从地下矿井中拖出的骡子，就会给业主带来困难和不愉快的局面。同样，铁路道床绵延数英里，很难守卫。工会暴徒相对容易袭击矿山和铁路并造成重大经济损失。在试图组织有效的工会时，这种袭击变得司空见惯。这些努力通常在实际工资因通货紧缩而上涨的时期最为激烈。当业主试图调整名义工资时，这往往会引发抗议，导致暴力。此类事件在 1873 年大恐慌之后的大萧条中普遍存在。

Mines and railroads also offered early targets of choice for union activism in America. Like the C&O Canal, they, too, were highly vulnerable to sabotage. Mines, for example, could be flooded, or blockaded at the entrance. Simply killing the mules that towed the ore cars out of underground mines created a difficult and unpleasant situation for the owners. Likewise, railroad trackbeds stretched over many miles, and could be guarded only with difficulty. It was relatively easy for union thugs to attack mines and railroads and do substantial economic damage. Such attacks became commonplace during attempts to organize effective unions. These efforts were generally most intense during periods when real wages were rising due to deflation. When owners attempted to adjust nominal wages, this often triggered protests leading to violence. Such incidents were widespread in the depression that followed the Panic of 1873.

1874 年 12 月，宾夕法尼亚州东部的无烟煤矿区爆发了公开战争。工会以一个名为“爱尔兰古代组织”的秘密社团为幌子组织了一支暴力罢工部队。此外这个团体以爱尔兰革命者的名字“莫莉·马奎尔”命名，以“恐吓煤矿并阻止那些想要工作的矿工工作”而闻名。破坏和毁坏财产、直接谋杀和暗杀都是对其成员的指控。” ¹⁹

In December 1874, open warfare erupted in the anthracite coalfields of eastern Pennsylvania. The unions organized a violent strike force in the guise of a secret society named the Ancient Order of Hibernians. Also known as the “Molly Maguires,” after an Irish revolutionary, this group was known for “terrorizing the coal fields and preventing those miners who wished to work from doing so. Sabotage and destruction of property, outright murder and assassination, were all charged against its members.”¹⁹

铁路员工之间也经常发生暴力事件。例如，1877 年 7 月发生了严重的暴乱，旨在破坏宾夕法尼亚铁路和巴尔的摩及俄亥俄铁路的财产。工人们接管了道岔，拆毁了轨道，封锁了车场，使机车瘫痪，破坏了火车，然后抢劫了火车，甚至更糟。在匹兹堡，宾夕法尼亚铁路的机车库被纵火焚烧，里面有数百人。数十人丧生，两千辆火车车厢被烧毁和抢劫，机械车间、谷物升降机和 125 台机车被毁。联邦军队介入以恢复秩序^。20

There was also recurring violence among railroad employees. For example, there were serious outbreaks in July 1877 aimed at destroying the property of both the Pennsylvania and Baltimore & Ohio railroads. Workers took over switches, tore up tracks, sealed off caryards, disabled locomotives, sabotaged, then looted trains, and worse. In Pittsburgh, roundhouses of the Pennsylvania Railroad were set ablaze with hundreds of people inside. Dozens were killed, two thousand railcars were burned and looted and the machine shop was destroyed, along with a grain elevator and 125 locomotives. Federal troops intervened to restore order.²⁰

尽管社会主义者和工会积极分子对这些早期罢工持同情态度，但它们并没有获得公众的支持。尽管矿山和铁路等行业本身就很脆弱，但总体政治环境尚不利于工人剥削资本家。企业规模太小，无法进行系统性的敲诈勒索。虽然存在脆弱的行业，但它们雇用的人口比例太小，无法让对雇主施加压力的好处得到广泛分享。如果没有这样的支持，这些罢工将无法持续下去，因为业主可以依靠政府的保护。虽然工会有时会试图通过恐吓来阻止地方官员执行禁令，但这些努力也很少成功。即使是最暴力的罢工也通常会在几天或几周内被军事手段镇压。

Although these early strikes were interpreted sympathetically by socialist and union activists, they inspired little public support. Notwithstanding the inherent vulnerability of industries such as mines and railroads, overall megapolitical conditions were not yet favorable to the exploitation of the capitalists by the workers. The scale of enterprise was too small to facilitate systematic extortion. While there were vulnerable industries, they employed too small a fraction of the population to allow the benefits of the coercion against employers to be broadly shared. Without such support, they were unsustainable because owners could depend upon the government for protection. While unions sometimes attempted through intimidation to prevent local officials from enforcing injunctions, these efforts, too, were seldom successful. Even the most violent strikes were usually suppressed within days or weeks by military means.

轻松勒索

Blackmail Made Easy

信息时代可以吸取的一个教训是，当企业规模较小时，工会试图将工资提高到市场出清水平以上的做法很少成功。即使是那些明显容易受到破坏的业务，如运河、铁路、有轨电车和矿山，也很难得到控制。这并不是因为工会不敢使用暴力。恰恰相反。暴力被大量使用，有时甚至针对知名人士。例如，在美国劳工运动中被称为“矿工复仇”的案件中，爱达荷州州长弗兰克·斯图内伯格 (Frank Steunenberg) 因反对矿工封锁科达伦 (Coeur d'Alene) 财产的企图而被工会雇佣的杀手投掷炸弹暗杀。21^但在 20 世纪大型工厂和大规模生产企业出现之前，即使是谋杀和谋杀威胁通常也不足以获得工会的认可。

There is a lesson to be learned for the Information Age in the fact that union attempts to achieve wages above market-clearing levels were seldom successful when firm size was small. Not even those lines of business that were clearly vulnerable to sabotage, such as canals, railways, streetcars, and mines, were easily brought under control. This is not because the unions shrank from using violence. To the contrary. Violence was lavishly employed, sometimes against high-profile individuals. For example, in a case celebrated in the American labor movement as a case of “miners’ vengeance,” Governor Frank Steunenberg of Idaho, who had opposed an attempt by miners to blockade properties at Coeur d’Alene, was assassinated by a bomb tossed by a contract killer hired by the union.²¹ But even murder and threats of murder were usually insufficient to obtain union recognition prior to the emergence of large-scale factories and mass-production enterprises in the twentieth century.

要理解为什么工会的情况在二十世纪发生了如此大的变化，你必须了解生产技术的特点。二十世纪初，随着蓝领工人的迅速增加，情况肯定发生了变化。这种变化使处于经济前沿的企业特别容易受到敲诈。事实上，工业技术的物理特性几乎促使工人采用胁迫手段来敲诈资本家。考虑一下：

To understand why the circumstances of unions underwent such a change in the twentieth century, you must look at the characteristics of production technology. Something definitely changed with the rapid rise of blue-collar factory employment in the early decades of the twentieth century. This change made businesses at the forefront of the economy especially vulnerable to extortion. In fact, the physical characteristics of industrial technology almost invited workers to employ coercion to shake down the capitalists. Consider:

1. 大多数工业产品都含有大量自然资源。这往往将生产集中在有限的几个地点，就像矿山必须建在矿体所在的地方一样。靠近交通中心、方便获得零部件供应商和原材料的工厂具有显著的运营优势。这使得政府和工会等强制性组织更容易为自己获取一些优势。

1. There was a high natural-resource content in most industrial products. This tended to anchor production to a limited number of locations, almost in the way that mines must be located where the ore bodies are. Factories placed near transportation centers with convenient access to parts suppliers and raw materials had significant operating advantages. This made it easier for coercive organizations, like governments and unions, to extract some of those advantages for themselves.

2. 规模经济的不断增长导致了大型企业的出现。十九世纪早期的工厂规模相对较小。但随着二十世纪流水线的出现，规模经济不断增长，生产流程最前沿的设施规模和成本迅速上升。这在多个方面使它们更容易成为目标。例如，显著的规模经济往往与较长的产品周期相伴而生。较长的产品周期使市场更加稳定。这反过来又引发了对企业的掠夺性攻击，因为这意味着可以获得更长期的利益。

2. Rising economies of scale led to very large enterprises. Early-nineteenth-century factories had been relatively small. But as scale economies increased with the assembly line during the twentieth century, the size and cost of facilities at the forefront of the production process rose rapidly. This made them easier targets in several ways. For example, significant scale economies tend to go hand in hand with long product cycles. Long product cycles make for more stable markets. This, in turn, invites predatory targeting of firms because it implies that there are longer-term benefits to capture.

3. 领先行业的竞争对手数量急剧下降。在工业化时期，只有少数几家公司争夺数十亿美元的市场并不罕见。这促使这些公司成为工会敲诈的目标。打击五家公司比打击五千家公司要简单得多。行业集中本身就是促进敲诈的一个因素。这种优势是自我强化的，因为被迫支付垄断工资的公司不太可能面临来自其他没有承受高于市场劳动力成本负担的公司激烈的竞争。因此，工会可以榨干这些公司的相当一部分利润，而不会让它们立即破产。显然，如果雇主在被迫支付高于市场工资时经常破产，工人强迫他们这样做就没有什么好处。

3. The number of competitors in leading industries fell sharply. It was not uncommon during the industrial period to find only a handful of firms competing for billion-dollar markets. This contributed to making these firms targets for union extortion. It is far simpler to attack five firms than five thousand. The very concentration of industry was itself a factor that facilitated extortion. This advantage was self-reinforcing because the firms coerced into paying monopoly wages were unlikely to face stiff competition from others who were not also burdened by above-market labor costs. Unions could therefore drain a considerable portion of the profits of such firms without exposing them to immediate bankruptcy. Obviously, if employers had routinely gone broke whenever they were forced to pay above-market wages, workers would have gained little by coercing them to do so.

4. 固定投资的资本要求随着企业规模的扩大而上升。这不仅增加了资本的脆弱性，放大了工厂关闭的成本；也使得现代工厂越来越不可能由一个人或一个家庭拥有，除非从某个规模较小的企业创办者那里继承。为了资助大型工厂的巨额制造和运营成本，数百或数千人的财富必须汇集在一起资本市场上的垄断。这往往使那些四分五裂、几乎匿名的所有者更难捍卫自己的财产。他们别无选择，只能依靠职业经理人，而这些经理人持有的公司流通股很少超过化学痕迹。对下属经理人的依赖削弱了公司对敲诈勒索的抵抗力。经理人缺乏冒着生命危险保护公司财产的强烈动机。他们的努力很少能与酒类商店和其他小企业的老板在财产受到威胁时所表现出的那种战斗精神相媲美。

4. The capital requirements for fixed investment rose to match the scale of enterprise. This not only increased the vulnerability of capital and magnified the costs of plant closures; it also made it increasingly unlikely that a modern factory could be owned by a single individual or family, except through inheritance from someone who had launched the business at a smaller scale. In order to fund the massive costs of tooling and operating a large factory, the wealth of hundreds or thousands of people had to be pooled together in capital markets. This tended to make it more difficult for the splintered and almost anonymous owners to defend their property. They had little choice but to rely upon professional managers who seldom held more than a bare chemical trace of the outstanding shares of the company. Reliance on subordinate managers weakened the resistance of firms to extortion. The managers lacked strong incentives to risk life and limb protecting the property of the firm. Their efforts seldom matched the kind of militancy commonly seen among owners of liquor stores and other small businesses when their property comes under threat.

5. 公司规模扩大也意味着，与过去任何时候相比，更多的劳动力受雇于更少的公司。在某些情况下，数万名工人在一家公司找到工作。从军事角度来看，业主和经理的数量远远少于下属。30:1 或更低的比例很常见。这种劣势随着公司规模的扩大而加剧，因为大量工人聚集在一起可以更容易地以匿名方式使用暴力。在这种情况下，工人不太可能与工厂老板有任何有意义的接触或关系。这些关系的匿名性无疑使工人更容易忽视业主财产权的重要性。

5. Greater firm size also meant that more of the total workforce was employed in fewer firms than at any time in the past. In some cases, tens of thousands of workers found employment in a single company. In military terms, the owners and managers were starkly outnumbered by persons employed in subordinate positions. Ratios of thirty to one or worse were common. This disadvantage rose with firm size because massive numbers of workers assembled together could more easily employ violence in an anonymous way. Under such conditions, the workers were unlikely to have had any meaningful contact or relationships with the owners of the factory. The anonymous character of these relationships no doubt made it easier for workers to dismiss the importance of the owners’ property rights.

6. 少数公司大规模雇佣工人是一种广泛的社会现象。与 19 世纪的美国相比，这进一步增强了工会享有的超级政治优势，当时大多数人都是自雇人士或在小公司工作。1940 年，60% 的美国劳动力从事蓝领工作。22^因此，大量人认为敲诈勒索可以提高工资，因此他们开始支持这种做法。1938-39 年的一项研究调查了俄亥俄州阿克伦市 1,700 人对公司财产的看法，说明了这一点。调查发现，68% 的产业工会联合会橡胶工人对公司财产的概念几乎没有同情心，“而只有 1% 的人被归类为强烈支持公司财产权的人。” ²³另一方面，没有一个商人，即使是小业主，属于“强烈反对公司财产”的同一类别； 94% 的人对财产权的支持率达到极高水平。” ²⁴

6. Massed employment in a small number of firms was a broad social phenomenon. This further enhanced the megapolitical advantages enjoyed by unions as compared to the nineteenth century in America, when most people were self-employed or working in small firms. In 1940, 60 percent of the American workforce had blue-collar jobs.²² As a consequence, support for the use of extortion to raise wages spread among a large number who imagined they might benefit by it. This was illustrated by a 1938-39 study of the views of 1,700 people in Akron, Ohio, toward corporate property. The survey found that 68 percent of the CIO Rubber Workers had very little or no sympathy with the concept of corporate property, “while only one percent were found in the classification of strong support of corporate property rights.”²³ On the other hand, not a single businessman, even a small proprietor, fell into the same category of “strong opposition to corporate property; 94 percent received ratings in the range of extremely high support for the rights of property.”²⁴

7. 装配线技术本质上是连续的。整个生产过程依赖于零件按固定顺序移动和组装，这一事实增加了中断的危险。实际上，装配线就像工厂围墙内的铁路。如果轨道被阻塞，或者单个零件的供应被切断，整个生产过程就会停止。

7. Assembly-line technology was inherently sequential. The fact that the whole production process depended upon the movement and assembly of parts in a fixed sequence created additional vulnerabilities to disruption. In effect, the assembly line was like a railroad within factory walls. If the track could be blocked, or the availability of a single part could be cut off, the whole production process was brought to a halt.

8. 流水线技术标准化工作。这减少了不同技能的人使用相同工具时，产出的变化性。事实上，工厂设计的一个关键目标是创建一个系统，让天才和白痴在流水线上连续轮班生产相同的产品。所谓的“愚蠢”机器被设计成只能进行一种输出。这使得即使是卡迪拉克的买家也不必询问生产他这辆车的流水线工人的身份。所有产品都应该是相同的，无论生产这些产品的工人的技能和智力有何差异。

8. Assembly-line technology standardized work. This reduced the variability of output for persons of different skills working with the same tools. In fact, a crucial objective of factory design was to create a system in which a genius and a moron on successive shifts of the assembly line would produce the same product. What might be called “stupid” machines were designed to be capable of only one kind of output. This made it unnecessary for even the buyer of a Cadillac to inquire about the identity of the line workers who produced his vehicle. All the products were meant to be alike, whatever the differences in skills and intelligence between the workers who produced them.

流水线上的非熟练工人可以生产出与更有能力的人相同的产品，这一事实有助于实现平等主义议程，因为它使每个人的经济贡献看起来都是平等的。企业家技能和脑力劳动似乎不那么重要。现代生产的魔力似乎在于机器本身。如果它们实际上不可能由每个人设计，那么它们似乎几乎每个人都可以理解。这让非熟练劳动力被工厂主“剥削”的虚构故事更加可信，工厂主可以把他们排除在外，除了他们自己，不会有任何人受到损失。“我们知道我们可以接管工厂，”一位通用汽车罢工者说。“我们已经知道如何经营它们。如果通用汽车不小心，那就把这两件事放在一起吧。” ²⁵

The fact that unskilled workers on the assembly line could produce the same product as more able individuals contributed to the egalitarian agenda by making it appear that everyone’s economic contributions were equal. Entrepreneurial skills and mental effort seemed less important. The magic of modern production appeared to lie in the machines themselves. If they could not actually have been designed by everyone, they nevertheless appeared to be intellectually accessible to almost everyone. This gave more plausibility to the fiction that unskilled labor was being “exploited” by factory owners who could be cut out of the equation with no loss to anyone but themselves. “We learned we can take the plant,” as one GM striker put it. “We already knew how to run them. If General Motors isn’t careful well put two and two together.”²⁵

工业技术的这些特点一致导致了工会的成立，以利用敲诈勒索的弱点，以及大政府通过对大型工业设施征收高额税收来发财致富。这种情况不是一两次发生的，而是在大型工业扎根的每个地方都发生过。一次又一次，工会出现，使用暴力手段，使工资大大高于市场水平。他们之所以能够做到这一点，是因为工业工厂往往昂贵、显眼、不可移动且成本高昂。它们几乎无法隐藏。它们无法移动。它们每停工一分钟，就意味着它们惊人的成本无法摊销。

These characteristics of industrial technology led uniformly to the creation of labor unions to exploit the vulnerability to shakedowns, and to larger governments that fattened on the high taxes that could be imposed upon large-scale industrial facilities. This did not happen once or twice, it happened everywhere large-scale industry took root. Time after time, unions emerged to employ violence to achieve wages considerably above market levels. They were able to do this because industrial factories tended to be expensive, conspicuous, immobile, and costly. They could scarcely be hidden. They could not be moved. Every moment they were out of service meant that their staggering costs were not being amortized.

所有这些都使他们成为强制勒索的靶子，这一事实在工会历史上比 20 世纪的主流意识形态所让你相信的要明显得多。著名经济学家亨利·西蒙斯在 1944 年提出了这个问题：

All this made them sitting ducks for coercive shakedowns, a fact that is far more obvious in the history of labor unions than the prevailing ideology of the twentieth century would have you believe. The noted economist Henry Simons framed the issue in 1944:

没有强大强制和恐吓力量的劳工组织是一种不切实际的抽象概念。工会现在拥有这样的权力；只要工会以目前的形式存在，它们就一直拥有，并且永远拥有。如果权力很小或不牢固，就必须公开和广泛地行使权力；如果权力很大且不受挑战，它就会变得像政府的权力一样，被自信地掌握，受到尊重，很少引人注目地展示出来。” ²⁶

Labor organization without large powers of coercion and intimidation is an unreal abstraction. Unions now have such powers; they always have had and always will have, so long as they persist in the present form. Where the power is small or insecurely possessed, it must be exercised overtly and extensively; large and unchallenged, it becomes like the power of government, confidently held, respectfully regarded, and rarely displayed conspicuously.”²⁶

尽管西蒙斯的分析十分准确，但他在一个关键点上却犯了错误。他假定工会“永远拥有”他所描述的“巨大的强制和恐吓权力”。事实上，工会正在逐渐衰落，不仅在美国和英国，而且在其他成熟的工业社会也是如此。工会衰落的原因是西蒙斯没有注意到，甚至许多工会组织者也未能理解，即向信息社会的转变已经以关键的方式改变了大政治条件，从而大幅提高了财产的安全性。微技术已经开始证明对支持福利国家的敲诈勒索具有颠覆性，因为即使在商业领域，它也创造了与工业时代截然不同的激励机制。

As precise as Simons’s analysis is, however, he was wrong about a crucial point. He presumed that unions “always will have” what he described as “large powers of coercion and intimidation.” In fact, unions are fading away, not merely in the United States and Great Britain, but in other mature industrial societies. The reason they are fading, what Simons missed and what even many union organizers fail to understand, is that the shift to an Information Society has altered megapolitical conditions in crucial ways that sharply increase the security of property. Microtechnology has already begun to prove subversive of the extortion that supports the welfare state because even in the commercial realm it creates very different incentives from those of the industrial period.

1. 信息技术几乎不包含自然资源。它几乎不具备任何固有的地理位置优势。大多数信息技术都具有高度的可移植性。由于信息技术可以独立于地点运行，因此它提高了思想、人员和资本的流动性。通用汽车公司无法打包其位于密歇根州弗林特的三条装配线然后飞走。但软件公司可以。所有者可以将他们的算法下载到便携式计算机中，然后乘坐下一班飞机离开。这些公司还有额外的诱因来逃避高额税收或工会对垄断工资的要求。较小的公司往往有更多的竞争对手。如果有数十个甚至数百个竞争对手诱惑你的客户，你就无法承担向政客或员工支付比他们实际价值高得多的报酬。如果你一个人试图这样做，你的成本将高于你的竞争对手，你就会破产。在特定地区缺乏显著的运营优势意味着强制性组织（如政府和工会）在试图为自己获取其中一些优势时不可避免地会利用较少的杠杆。

1. Information technology has negligible natural-resource content. It confers few if any inherent advantages of location. Most information technology is highly portable. Because it can function independent of place, information technology increases the mobility of ideas, persons, and capital. General Motors could not pack up its three assembly lines in Flint, Michigan, and fly away. A software company can. The owners can download their algorithms into portable computers and take the next plane out. Such firms also have an added inducement to escape high taxes or union demands for monopoly wages. Smaller firms tend to have more competitors. If you have dozens or even hundreds of competitors tempting your customers, you cannot afford to pay politicians or your employees much more than they are actually worth. If you alone tried to do so, your costs would be higher than your competitors and you would go broke. The absence of significant operating advantages in a given locale means that coercive organizations, like governments and unions, will inevitably have less leverage to exploit in trying to extract some of those advantages for themselves.

2. 信息技术降低了企业规模。这使得公司规模变小，这意味着竞争对手数量增加。竞争加剧减少了敲诈勒索的可能性，因为必须通过物理控制来提高工资或税率，从而提高竞争水平。信息技术促使公司平均规模急剧下降，已经减少了在下属岗位上工作的人数。例如，在美国，广泛报道的估计数字表明，1996 年有多达 3000 万人在自己的公司独自工作。显然，这 3000 万人不太可能对自己进行罢工。在拥有少数员工的小公司工作的另外数百万人试图强迫雇主支付高于市场水平的工资的可能性略低。

2. Information technology lowers the scale of enterprise. This makes for smaller firm size, which implies a larger number of competitors. Increased competition reduces the potential for extortion by raising the number of targets that must be physically controlled in order to raise wages or tax rates above competitive levels. The sharp fall in the average size of firms facilitated by information technology has already reduced the number of persons employed in subordinate positions. In the United States, for example, widely reported estimates suggest that as many as 30 million persons worked alone in their own firms in 1996. Obviously, these 30 million are unlikely to go on strike against themselves. It is only slightly less plausible that the additional millions who work in small firms with a handful of employees would attempt to coerce their employers into paying above-market wages.

在信息时代，那些希望通过敲诈勒索来提高工资的工人将缺乏压倒性的数量优势，而这种优势使他们在工厂中更加强大。雇佣的人数越少，在任何公司中，匿名暴力的机会就越少。仅仅出于这个原因，一万名工人分散在五百家公司中，对公司财产的威胁就会小于一万名工人在一家公司中，即使工人与所有者/经理的比例完全相同。

In the Information Age, workers who wish to raise their wages through extortion will lack the military advantage of overwhelming numbers that made them more formidable within the factory. The fewer persons employed in any firm, the fewer the opportunities for anonymous violence. For this reason alone, ten thousand workers divided among five hundred firms would pose a lesser threat to the property of those firms than ten thousand workers in a single firm, even if the ratio of workers to owners/managers were exactly the same.

3. 企业规模的缩小也意味着，争取高于市场工资的努力不太可能像在工业化时期那样获得广泛的社会支持。试图敲诈雇主的工会更有可能发现自己处于十九世纪运河工人、铁路工人和矿工的境地。即使少数具有大规模经济的公司仍然是工业时代的遗留物，它们也会在小公司广泛分散的就业环境中这样做。小公司和小农户的占主导地位表明，即使收入再分配的愿望保持不变，社会对产权的支持也会更大。

3. Falling scale in enterprise also implies that efforts to secure above-market wages are less likely to command broad social support, as they did in the industrial period. Unions seeking to shake down employers are much more likely to find themselves in the situation of the canal workers, railroad employees, and miners of the nineteenth century. Even where a few firms with large-scale economies remain as holdovers from the Industrial Age, they will do so in a context of widely dispersed employment in small firms. The preponderance of small firms and smallholders suggests greater social support for property rights even if the desire to redistribute income remains unaltered.

4. 信息技术降低了资本成本，这也有助于促进创业，让更多人能够独立工作，从而增加竞争。较低的资本要求不仅降低了进入门槛，还降低了“退出门槛”。换句话说，这意味着公司相对于收入而言可能拥有更少的资产，因此承受损失的能力也更低。信息时代的公司不仅倾向于减少向银行借款，而且可能拥有更少的实物资产。

4. Information technology lowers capital costs, which also tends to increase competition by facilitating entrepreneurship and allowing more people to work independently. Lower capital requirements not only reduce barriers to entry; they also reduce “barriers to exit.” In other words, they imply that firms are likely to have fewer assets relative to income, and therefore less ability to sustain losses. Not only will they tend to have less recourse to banks for borrowing; firms in the Information Age are also likely to have fewer physical assets to capture.

5. 信息技术缩短了产品周期。这导致产品更快过时。这也往往使得通过勒索高于市场工资而获得的任何收益都转瞬即逝。在竞争激烈的市场中，过高的工资可能直接导致公司迅速失业，甚至破产。为了获得暂时更高的工资而牺牲自己的工作，就像为了让房子温度升高几度而烧掉家具一样。

5. Information technology shortens the product cycle. This makes for more rapid product obsolescence. This, too, tends to make any gains that might be achieved by extorting above-market wages short-lived. In highly competitive markets, wages that are too high may lead directly to a rapid loss of jobs and even bankruptcy for the firm. Grasping for temporarily higher wages at the expense of placing your job in jeopardy is like burning your furniture to make the house a few degrees warmer.

6. 信息技术不是连续的，而是同时的和分散的。与流水线不同，信息技术可以同时容纳多个流程。它分散网络上的活动，允许工作站之间的冗余和替换，这些工作站可能数量达数千甚至数百万，遍布全球各地。在越来越多的活动中，人们可以在不进行身体接触的情况下进行合作。随着虚拟现实和视频会议变得越来越先进，功能分散和远程办公的趋势将会加速。这相当于信息时代的“淘汰”，打破了中世纪行会的权力。

6. Information technology’ is not sequential but simultaneous and dispersed. Unlike the assembly line, information technology can accommodate multiple processes at the same time. It disperses activities on networks, allowing for redundancy and substitution between workstations that could number in the thousands or even the millions and be anywhere on earth. In increasing numbers of activities, it is possible for people to cooperate without ever coming into physical contact with one another. As virtual reality and video conferencing become more advanced, the trend toward dispersal of functions and telecommuting will accelerate. This is the Information Age equivalent of “putting out,” which broke the power of the medieval guilds.

事实上，在烟雾缭绕的工厂里一起工作的人越来越少，这不仅剥夺了工人以前享有的重要优势在策划对资本家的敲诈勒索方面，这也使得人们越来越难以区分工作场所中可以接受的敲诈勒索类型和敲诈勒索。迄今为止，只有在共同环境中一起工作并受雇于同一家公司的人才被允许使用暴力来提高收入。但如果“工作场所”不作为中心位置存在，并且大多数功能分散到分包商和远程办公人员，那么就很难区分敲诈勒索和敲诈勒索，敲诈勒索是敲诈客户或“雇主”的行为。

The fact that fewer and fewer people will be working together in smoky factories not only takes away an important advantage that workers formerly enjoyed in engineering shakedowns of capitalists; it also makes it increasingly difficult even to distinguish from racketeering the type of extortion that has been acceptable in the workplace. Heretofore, only persons who have worked together and been employed-by a firm in a common setting have been permitted to use violence in the attempt to raise their incomes. But if the “workplace” does not exist as a central location, and most of the functions are dispersed to subcontractors and telecommuters, there is very little to distinguish from a shakedown racket their efforts to extort money from their clients or “employers.”

例如，一位远程办公人员以感染公司计算机病毒为威胁，要求加薪，这算是罢工工人吗？还是网络敲诈勒索者？

For example, is a telecommuter who demands extra cash under threat of infecting the company’s computers with a virus a worker on strike? Or an Internet racketeer?

他是其中一人还是另一人，结果将毫无区别。无论如何，目标公司的反应可能大体相同。信息破坏的技术解决方案，如改进的加密和网络安全，可以应对外部黑客的威胁，也应该使心怀不满的员工或分包商无法向经常或偶尔与其打交道的各方造成损害。

Whether he is one or the other will prove to be a distinction without a difference. The reaction of the targeted firms is likely to be much the same in any event. Technical solutions to information sabotage, like improved encryption and network security, that would answer the danger of an outside hacker should also render moot the capacity of the disgruntled employee or subcontractor to impose damage on parties with whom he regularly or sporadically deals.

当然，有人可能会说，工人或远程办公人员可以一直到办公室上班，在那里进行更传统的罢工。但即便如此，在信息时代，这可能也不像看起来那么简单。信息技术能够超越地域性并分散经济功能，这意味着雇员和雇主首次甚至不需要居住在同一个管辖区。这里，我们谈论的不是梅菲尔区和佩克汉姆区之间的区别，而是百慕大的雇主和新德里的远程办公人员之间的区别。

Of course, it might be suggested that the worker or telecommuter could always report to the office and carry on a more traditional strike there. But even this may not be as simple as it would seem in the Information Age. The capacity of information technology to transcend locality and disperse economic functions means that for the first time employees and employers need not even reside in the same jurisdictions. Here, we are not talking about the difference between being in the boroughs of Mayfair and Peckham, but of employers in Bermuda and telecommuters in New Delhi.

此外，如果印度人对 1936-37 年通用汽车大罢工的报道着迷，并决心前往百慕大进行抗议，他们到达后可能会发现根本没有实体办公室。大型广告公司 Chiat/Day 已着手拆除其总部。其员工或分包商通过呼叫转移和互联网保持联系。当需要组建人才团队来协调客户项目的工作时，他们会租用酒店会议室。项目结束后，他们就会退房。

Furthermore, if the Indians became infatuated by accounts of the great GM strikes of 1936-37 and determined to journey to Bermuda to picket, they might find no physical office at all when they arrived. Chiat/Day, a large advertising company, has already set about dismantling its headquarters. Its employees, or subcontractors, stay in touch through call-forwarding and the Internet. When it becomes necessary to assemble talent teams to coordinate work on account projects, they rent hotel meeting rooms. When the project is over they check out.

微处理有助于将生产过程从固定的装配线顺序中解放出来并分散，这一事实大大降低了工会和政府等强制性机构以前享有的影响力。如果装配线就像工厂围墙内的铁路，可以通过静坐罢工轻易占领，那么网络空间就是一个没有物理存在的无限领域。它不能被武力占领或勒索。希望使用暴力作为筹码来在信息时代，获取更高收入的难度要比 1936-37 年通用汽车静坐罢工者要大得多。

The fact that microprocessing helps to liberate and disperse the production process from the fixed sequence of the assembly line greatly reduces the leverage formerly enjoyed by coercive institutions like unions and governments. If the assembly line were like a railroad within factory walls that could easily be captured by a sit-down strike, cyberspace is an unbounded realm without physical existence. It cannot be occupied by force or held to ransom. The position of employees wishing to use violence as leverage to extract higher incomes will be far weaker in the Information Age than it was for the sit-down strikers at General Motors in 1936-37.

7. 微处理使工作个性化。工业技术使工作标准化。任何人使用相同的工具都会产生相同的产出。微技术已经开始用更智能的技术取代“愚蠢”的机器，这些技术能够实现高度可变的产出。对于使用相同工具的人来说，产出的可变性增加具有深远的影响，我们将在接下来的章节中探讨其中的许多影响。其中最重要的是，产出变化的地方，收入也会变化。技能不同的领域的大部分价值往往是由少数人创造的。这是竞争最激烈的市场的共同特征。例如，在体育方面，这一点非常明显。全世界有数百万年轻人踢各种足球。但观看足球比赛所花费的 99% 的钱都花在了观看总人数中极小一部分球员的表演上。同样，世界上充满了有抱负的演员。但只有相对较少的人成为明星。同样，每年出版数万本书。但大部分版税都支付给了少数真正能娱乐读者的畅销书作家。不幸的是，我们不在其中。

7. Microprocessing individualizes work. Industrial technology standardized work. Anyone using the same tools would produce the same output. Microtechnology has started replacing “stupid” machines with more intelligent technology capable of highly variable output. The increased variability of output for persons using the same tools has profound implications, many of which we explore in coming chapters. Among the more important is the fact that where output varies, incomes vary as well. Most of the value in fields where skill varies will tend to be created by a small number of persons. This is a common characteristic of the most highly competitive markets. It is quite evident, for example, in sports. Many millions of young people worldwide play various versions of football. But 99 percent of the money that is spent to watch football games is paid to see the performances of a tiny fraction of the total number of players. Likewise, the world is full of aspiring actors and actresses. Yet only a relatively small number become stars. Equally, tens of thousands of books are published annually. But most of the royalty money is paid to a small number of best-selling authors who can really entertain their readers. Unhappily, we are not among them.

使用相同设备的人员之间产出的巨大差异是敲诈勒索的另一个障碍。它产生了一个关于如何分享收益的重大谈判问题。如果参与某一特定活动的人中只有一小部分人创造了大部分价值，那么从数学上讲，他们不可能因为平均收入的强制结果而受益。一名软件程序员可能会设计出一种控制机器人的算法，事实证明该算法价值数百万。而另一个使用相同设备的程序员可能会编写一个一文不值的程序。生产力更高的程序员不太可能希望将自己的收入与同胞的收入挂钩，就像汤姆·克兰西不太可能同意将他的图书版税与我们的平均收入挂钩一样。

The vast variability of output among persons employing the same equipment poses yet another obstacle to extortion. It creates a major bargaining problem about how to share the payoff. Where a relatively small proportion of those participating in a given activity create most of the value, it is all but mathematically impossible for them to be left better off by a coerced outcome that averages incomes. One software programmer may devise an algorithm for controlling a robot that proves to be worth millions. Another, working with identical equipment, may write a program worth nothing. The more productive programmer is no more likely to wish to have his income tied to that of his compatriot than Tom Clancy is to agree to average his book royalties with ours.

即使是在信息革命的早期阶段，人们也比 1975 年更加明显地认识到，技能和智力是经济产出的关键变量。这已经使工业化时期盛行的工人敲诈资本家的合理化理由烟消云散。认为非熟练劳动力实际上创造了似乎被资本家和企业家不成比例地收入囊中的价值的幻想已经过时了。在信息技术的情况下，这甚至不是一个合理的虚构。当程序员坐下来编写代码时，他的技能和他的产品之间存在着太直接的联系，以至于无法在谁应该负责的问题上出现太多错误。文盲或半文盲是无法编写计算机程序的，这是毫无争议的。因此，同样明显的是，其他人编写的程序中的任何价值不可能从他身上偷走。这就是为什么现在主要在清洁工中听到工人“剥削”的呼声。

Even the early stages of the Information Revolution have made it far more obvious than it was in 1975 that skills and mental ability are crucial variables in economic output. This has already vaporized the once-proud rationalization for extortion of the capitalists by the workers that prevailed during the industrial period. The fantasy that unskilled labor actually created the value that seemed to be pocketed in a disproportionate share by the capitalists and entrepreneurs is already an anachronism. It is not even a plausible fiction in the case of information technology. When the programmer sits down to write code, there is too direct a line of attribution between his skill and his product to allow for much mistake about who is responsible. It is obvious beyond dispute that an illiterate or semi-literate could not program a computer. It is therefore equally obvious that any value in programs compiled by others could not have been stolen from him. This is why cries of “exploitation” by workers are now heard mainly among janitors.

信息技术清楚地表明，低技能人员面临的问题不是他们的生产能力被不公平地利用，而是担心他们可能缺乏做出真正经济贡献的能力。正如凯文·凯利在《失控》中所言，信息时代的“新贵”汽车公司可能是“十几个人”的创意，他们将大部分零部件外包，但生产的汽车比底特律或东京的任何汽车都更精心定制，更符合买家的愿望：“每辆汽车都是根据客户需求量身定制的，由客户网络订购，完成后立即发货。汽车车身的模具由计算机引导的激光快速成型，并根据客户反应和目标营销产生的设计进行加工。一条灵活的机器人生产线负责组装汽车。机器人的维修和改进外包给机器人公司。” ²⁷

Information technology is making it plain that the problem faced by persons of low skill is not that their productive capacities are being unfairly taken advantage of, but rather the fear that they may lack the ability to make a real economic contribution. As Kevin Kelly suggests in Out of Control, the “Upstart” car company of the Information Age may be the brainchild of “a dozen people,” who will outsource most of their parts, and still produce cars more carefully customized and tailored to their buyer’s wishes than anything yet seen from Detroit or Tokyo: “Cars, each one customer-tailored, are ordered by a network of customers and shipped the minute they are done. Molds for the car’s body are rapidly shaped by computer-guided lasers, and fed designs generated by customer response and target marketing. A flexible line of robots assembles the cars. Robot repair and improvement is outsourced to a robot company.”²⁷

“有声音的工具”

“Tools with a Voice”

越来越多的非技术性工作可以由自动化机器、机器人和数字助理等计算系统完成。当亚里士多德将奴隶描述为“会说话的工具”时，他指的是人类。在不久的将来，“会说话的工具”就像寓言中的精灵一样，能够说话并听从指令，甚至处理复杂的任务。计算能力的快速增长已经带来了许多语音识别的原始应用，例如免提电话和按照口头指令进行数学计算的计算机。将语音转换为文本的计算机早在 1996 年底就已上市。随着模式识别能力的提高，与语音合成器相连的计算机将通过网络运行，执​​行许多以前由电话接线员、秘书、旅行社、行政助理、国际象棋冠军、索赔处理员、作曲家、债券交易员、网络战专家、武器分析师甚至是接听 900 电话的街头调情者所承担的功能。

To an increasing extent, unskilled work can be done by automated machines, robots, and computational systems, like digital assistants. When Aristotle described slaves as “tools with a voice,” he was talking about human beings. In the not-distant future, “tools with a voice,” like the genies of fable, will be able to speak and follow instructions, and even handle complex assignments. Rapidly increasing computational power has already brought forth a number of primitive applications of voice recognition, such as handsfree telephones and computers that perform mathematical computations following verbal instructions. Computers that convert speech to text were already being marketed in late 1996 as we write. As pattern-recognition capabilities improve, computers linked to voice synthesizers will operate through networks to perform numerous functions formerly undertaken by humans employed as telephone operators, secretaries, travel agents, administrative assistants, chess champions, claims processors, composers, bond traders, cyberwar specialists, weapons analysts, or even street-smart flirts who answer the telephones on 900 calls.

卡内基梅隆大学的迈克尔·莫尔丁编写了一个“机器人”，一个名叫朱莉娅的人造人，她能够欺骗几乎所有在互联网上与她交谈的人。据新闻报道，朱莉娅是一个“爱说俏皮话的女人，她的生活就像一个互联网角色扮演游戏。她聪明、有趣，喜欢调情。她还是个曲棍球高手，能够在瞬间想出完美的讽刺评论。然而，朱莉娅并不是个淑女。她是一个机器人，一个只存在于互联网以太中的人工智能。” ²⁸令人吃惊的进展在人工智能和数字服务编程方面已经取得的成就毫无疑问意味着许多实际应用仍将出现。这将产生重大的超级政治后果。

Michael Mauldin of Carnegie-Mellon University has programmed a “bot,” an artificial personality named Julia, who is capable of fooling almost anyone with whom she converses on the Internet. According to press reports, Julia is a “wise-cracking dame who lives out her life in a role-playing game on the Internet. She is smart, funny and loves to flirt. She is also a bit of a hockey whiz and able to come up with the perfect sarcastic comment on a moment’s notice. Julia, however, is no lady. She is a bot, an artificial intelligence that exists only in the ether of the Internet.”²⁸ The startling progress that has already been made in programming artificial intelligence and digital servants leaves little doubt that many practical applications are still to come. This has significant megapolitical consequences.

个体作为一个整体

The Individual as an Ensemble

开发用于多种应用的“语音工具”为将个人分散到多个同时进行的活动中创造了可能性。个人将不再是单一的个体，而可能是通过智能代理进行的数十甚至数千个活动的集合。这不仅将大大提高最有才华的个人的生产能力；它还将使主权个人在军事上比以往任何时候更加强大。

Development of “tools with a voice” for multiple applications creates the possibility for dispersal of the individual into multiple simultaneous activities. The individual will no longer be singular, but potentially an ensemble of dozens or perhaps even thousands of activities undertaken through intelligent agents. This will not only greatly enhance the productive capability of the most talented individuals; it will also make the Sovereign Individual potentially far more formidable militarily than the individual has ever been before.

一个人不仅能够通过使用几乎无限数量的智能代理来明显地增加其活动量，他或她甚至能够在死后采取行动。这是第一次，一个人即使在生理上已经死亡的情况下，也能够执行复杂的任务。无论是战争中的敌人还是罪犯，都不再可能通过杀死一个人来完全消灭其报复的能力。这是整个历史上暴力逻辑中最具革命性的创新之一。

Not only will one individual be able to manifestly multiply his activities by employing an essentially unlimited number of intelligent agents. He or she will even be able to act after death. For the first time, an individual will be capable of carrying on elaborate tasks even if he is biologically dead. It will no longer be possible for either an enemy at war or a criminal to completely extinguish the capability of an individual to retaliate by killing him. This is one of the more revolutionary innovations in the logic of violence in the whole of history.

信息时代的洞察

Insights for the Information Age

生活中最大的变化发生在无人关注的变量上。或者换句话说，我们把几个世纪甚至几百代以来几乎没有变化的变量视为理所当然。在历史的大部分时间里，如果不是在人类存在的大部分时间里，保护和勒索之间的平衡一直在一个狭窄的范围内波动，勒索总是占上风。现在这种情况即将改变。信息技术正在为决定诉诸暴力的成本和回报的因素的根本转变奠定基础。智能代理将可用于调查并以某种方式报复那些发起暴力的人，这一事实只是这种保护新前景的一个暗示。25 年前，以下声明只不过是一个怪人的胡言乱语：“如果你杀了我，我会把你银行账户里的钱转走，捐给尼泊尔的慈善机构。” 千禧年后，可能就不是了。它是否会成为一种实际威胁将取决于时间和地点的因素。然而，即使这个潜在不法分子的账户被证明是坚不可摧的，也肯定会有一支由智能特工组成的军队可能会为了报复犯罪而采取其他代价高昂的恶作剧。想想看。

The biggest changes in life occur to variables that no one watches. Or to put it another way, we take for granted variables that have fluctuated very little for centuries or even hundreds of generations. For most of history, if not for most of human existence, the balance between protection and extortion has fluctuated within a narrow margin, with extortion always holding the upper hand. Now that is about to change. Information technology is laying the groundwork for a fundamental shift in the factors that determine the costs and rewards of resorting to violence. The fact that intelligent agents will be available to investigate and perhaps retaliate in one fashion or another against those who initiate violence is merely a hint of this new vista in protection. Twenty-five years ago, the following statement would have been no more than the ranting of a crank: “If you kill me, I will sweep the money out of your bank accounts and give it to charities in Nepal.” After the turn of the millennium, it may not be. Whether it would prove to be a practical threat would be determined by factors of time and place. Yet even if the would-be miscreant’s accounts proved to be impermeable, there would surely be other costly mischief that an army of intelligent agents could impose in retaliation for a crime. Think about it.

保护的新选择

New Alternatives in Protection

这只是信息时代技术为加强保护而开辟的众多方式之一，其中大多数方式往往会破坏政府在过去两个世纪中享有的近乎垄断的保护和勒索。即使没有新技术的炫目，保护也总是有其他选择，并非所有选择都倾向于被政府垄断。

This is only one of many ways to enhance protection that are being opened by the technology of the Information Age, most of which tend to undermine the near-monopoly on protection and extortion that has been enjoyed by governments in the past two centuries. Even without the new technological razzle-dazzle, there have always been alternatives for protection, not all of which have tended to be monopolized by government.

感到受到威胁的人可能会直接逃跑。当世界还很年轻，视野还很开阔时，逃跑是常见的选择。当人们担心因盗窃或破坏而遭受损失时，他们可能会选择购买保险单来赔偿此类风险。咒语和符咒虽然是较弱的保护形式，但也挽救了生命并防止了盗窃行为。它们有时在掠夺者迷信的社会中很有效。贵重物品也可以通过隐藏来保护。有时这是一种有效的方法。资产可以埋起来。用锁锁起来。放在高墙后面。并安装警报器和电子监控设备。但隐藏人和财产并不总是可行的。

A person who feels threatened may simply run away. When the world was young and horizons were open, the option to flee was commonly employed. When people worry about losses due to theft or vandalism, they may elect to purchase insurance policies to indemnify such risks. Curses and spells, although weak forms of protection, have also saved lives and warded off acts of theft. They sometimes work in societies where predators are superstitious. Valuables may also be protected by being hidden. This is sometimes an effective method when it can be employed. Assets can be buried. Secured with locks. Placed behind high walls. And rigged with sirens and electronic monitoring devices. But hiding person and property have not always been practical.

历史上曾使用过各种各样的保护手段，但其中一种方法最为有效——以暴制暴，使用更强大的武力制服任何袭击你或偷窃你财产的人。问题是，你可以从哪里获得这样的服务，以及如何激励任何人冒着生命危险帮助你对抗可能对你使用武力的暴徒。有时，近亲会响应号召。有时，部落和氏族团体充当非官方警察，以血仇报复针对其成员的暴力行为。有时，雇佣兵或私人保镖被用来抵御攻击，但并不总是像你希望的那样有用。信息时代的新型智能代理，尽管他们的活动将主要局限于网络空间，但也增加了一种新的选择。他们的忠诚与雇佣兵、私人保镖甚至远房亲戚不同，是无可争议的。

For all the variety of means of protection that have been employed historically, one method has dominated all others—the capacity to trump violence with violence, to call on greater force to overwhelm anyone who would assault you or steal your property. The question is where you can turn for such a service, and how you can motivate anyone to risk life and limb to help you battle thugs who might initiate force against you. Sometimes close relatives have answered the call. Sometimes tribal and clan-based groups have served as an unofficial police, responding to violence against any of their members with blood vendettas. Sometimes mercenaries or private guards have been employed to fend off attack, but not always as usefully as you might wish. The new intelligent agents of the Information Age, although their activities will be largely confined to cyberspace, add a new alternative. Their loyalties, unlike those of the mercenaries, private guards, and even remote cousins, will be beyond dispute.

权力的悖论

The Paradoxes of Power

用暴力来对抗暴力充满了悖论。在迄今为止存在的条件下，任何你可以雇佣来成功保护你的生命和财产免受攻击的团体或机构都会也必然有能力承担其中任何一项。这是一个没有简单答案的缺点。通常，你可以指望竞争来阻止经济服务提供商忽视客户的意愿。但在暴力问题上，直接竞争往往会产生反作用。在过去，它通常会导致暴力事件的增加。当两个所谓的保护机构派出部队互相逮捕时，其结果更像是内战而不是保护。当你寻求保护以免受暴力侵害时，你通常不希望增加暴力的产出，而是希望抑制暴力。并且在不允许掠夺支付保护服务费用的客户的情况下抑制暴力。

The use of violence to protect against violence is fraught with paradoxes. Under conditions that have heretofore existed, any group or agency that you could employ to successfully protect your life and wealth from attack would also necessarily have had the capacity to take either. That is a drawback for which there is no easy answer. Normally, you could look to competition to keep providers of an economic service from ignoring the wishes of their customers. But where violence is concerned, direct competition often has perverse results. In the past, it has usually led to increased violence. When two would-be protective agencies send their forces to arrest one another, the result is more akin to civil war than protection. When you are seeking protection from violence you normally do not wish to increase the output of violence but to suppress it. And to suppress it on terms that do not allow the plundering of the customers who pay for the protection service in the first place.

“……当人们没有一种共同的力量使他们都感到敬畏时，他们就处于一种被称为战争的状态：这种战争是每个人与每个人之间的战争……在这种状态下，人们除了自己的力量和自己的发明之外，没有其他的安全保障。 ”

—托马斯·霍布斯

“…during the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war: and such a war, as is of every man, against every man… wherein men live without other security than what their own strength and their own inventions shall furnish them withal.”

—THOMAS HOBBES

垄断与无政府状态

Monopoly and Anarchy

这就是为什么无政府状态，或者霍布斯所说的“所有人反对所有人的战争”，很少是一种令人满意的状态。使用暴力的局部竞争通常意味着为保护付出更高的成本，而享受到的保护却更少。偶尔，自由思想的市场狂热分子会提出，单靠市场机制就足以提供对财产权的监管和对生命的保护，而不需要任何主权。29一些分析很巧妙，但事实是，在工业主义的超级政治条件下，自由市场提供的警察和司法服务已被证明是不可行的。只有在行为高度刻板^、人口极少且同质的原始社会中，没有政府通过暴力提供局部垄断保护的服务，才能生存下来。

This is why anarchy, or “the war of all against all,” as Hobbes described it, has seldom been a satisfactory state of affairs. Local competition in the use of violence has usually meant paying higher costs for protection and enjoying less of it. Occasionally, freethinking enthusiasts for the market have suggested that market mechanisms alone would be sufficient to provide for policing of property rights and protection of life, without any need for a sovereignty whatsoever.²⁹ Some of the analytics have been elegant, but the fact remains that free-market provision of police and justice services has not proven viable under the megapolitical conditions of industrialism. Only primitive societies where behavior is highly stereotyped and populations are tiny and homogeneous have been able to survive without governments to provide the service of locally monopolizing protection through violence.

狩猎采集部落之上的无政府社会的例子很少，而且很古老。它们都是孤立的雨水农民最简单的经济体。前穆斯林阿富汗的卡菲尔人。黑暗时代的一些爱尔兰部落。巴西、委内瑞拉和巴拉圭的一些印第安部落。世界各地其他土著居民。他们组织没有政府的保护的方法只有极端案例的鉴赏家才知道。如果你想了解更多关于它们的信息，我们在注释中引用了几本书，其中包含更多细节。30^原始群体能够在没有专门从事暴力活动的独特组织的情况下运作因为它们是小型的、封闭的社会。而且它们与世隔绝。它们可以利用紧密的亲属关系来抵御有限规模的大多数暴力威胁，而这也是它们唯一可能遇到的威胁。当它们遇到由国家组织的更大威胁时，它们会被击败，并受到外部团体垄断的统治。这种情况一再发生。无论在哪里，只要社会的规模超过群体和部落，特别是在贸易路线使不同民族接触的地方，暴力专家就会出现，掠夺更和平的人所能生产的任何剩余产品。当技术条件提高了暴力的回报时，它们注定了那些没有组织起来将大量资源投入战争的社会会灭亡。

Examples of anarchic societies above the level of the hunting-and-gathering tribe are few and ancient. They are all among the simplest economies of isolated rainwater farmers. The Kafirs in pre-Muslim Afghanistan. Some Irish tribes in the Dark Ages. Some Indian bands in Brazil, Venezuela, and Paraguay. Other aboriginals in scattered parts of the world. Their methods of organizing protection without government are known only to connoisseurs of extreme cases. If you would like to learn more about them, we cite several books in our Notes that contain more details.³⁰ Primitive groups were able to function without a distinct organization specializing in violence only because they were small, closed societies. And they were isolated. They could draw on tight kinship relations to defend against most violent threats on a limited scale, which were the only sort they were likely to encounter. When they encountered larger threats, organized by states, they were overpowered and subjected to rule monopolized by outside groups. This happened over and over. Wherever societies have formed at a scale above bands and tribes, especially where trade routes brought different peoples into contact, specialists in violence have always emerged to plunder any surplus more peaceful people could produce. When technological conditions raised the returns to violence, they doomed societies that were not organized to channel large resources into making war.

“哪些王子在提供警察服务？哪些是敲诈勒索者甚至是抢劫者？只要一个抢劫者规范他的‘收入’，使其适应支付能力，保卫他的领地免受其他抢劫者的侵害，并维持他的领土垄断足够长的时间，使习俗使其合法化，那么他实际上就可以成为警察局长，” ³¹

—弗雷德里克·C·莱恩

"Which princes were rendering the service of police? Which were racketeers or even plunderers? A plunderer could become in effect the chief of police as soon as he regularized his ‘take,’ adapted it to the capacity to pay, defended his preserve against other plunderers, and maintained his territorial monopoly long enough for custom to make it legitimate,”³¹

—FREDERIC C. LANE

政府作为保护的卖方

Government as a Seller of Protection

正如我们多次说过的，从纳税人的角度来看，政府的主要经济职能是保护生命和财产。然而，政府的运作方式往往像有组织犯罪，从其运作范围内的人们那里榨取资源作为贡品或掠夺。政府不仅是一种保护服务；它还是一种保护敲诈。虽然政府提供保护以防止他人的暴力行为，但就像保护敲诈一样，它还向客户收取保护费以防止它自己施加的伤害。第一个行动是经济服务。第二个是敲诈。在实践中，两种形式的“保护”可能很难区分。正如查尔斯·蒂利所指出的那样，政府也许最好被理解为“我们最大的有组织犯罪例子” ^。32

As we have said at several points, government’s principal economic function from the perspective of those who pay the taxes is to provide protection of life and property. Yet the government often operates like organized crime, extracting resources from people within its sphere of operations as tribute or plunder. Government is not only a protection service; it is also a protection racket. While government provides protection against violence originating with others, like the protection racket it also charges customers for protection against harm that it would otherwise impose itself. The first action is an economic service. The second is a racket. In practice, the distinction between the two forms of “protection” may be difficult to make. Governments, as Charles Tilly has pointed out, may perhaps be best understood as “our largest examples of organized crime.”³²

即使是最好的政府，其活动通常也会涉及某种形式的经济保护服务与敲诈勒索的混合。从历史上看，如果政府能够在其行动区域内近乎垄断强制手段，那么这两种行为都可以得到最优化。如果一个武装团体能够在使用暴力方面占据主导地位，那么它所能提供的保护服务的质量通常远远高于其他武装团体。比在同一领土上交战的几家相互竞争的保护机构所提供的服务要好得多。

The activities of even the best government usually involved some mixture of the economic service of protection combined with extortion. Historically, both pursuits could be optimized if the government could impose a near-monopoly on coercion within the territories where it operates. In cases where a single armed group could establish predominance in the use of violence, the quality of the protection service it could provide was normally far superior to what could be had from one of several competing protection agencies thrown into battle over the same territory.

土地的自然垄断

A Natural Monopoly on Land

实现强制手段的本地垄断不仅使政府能够更有效地保护其潜在客户免受他人暴力侵害，而且还大大降低了政府的运营成本。正如莱恩所说：“使用暴力、控制暴力的行业是一种自然垄断，至少在陆地上是如此。在领土范围内，垄断企业可以更便宜地提供其提供的服务。” ³³因此，“在相邻领土内垄断使用武力使生产保护品的企业能够改进其产品并降低成本。” ³⁴如果这样的治理组织不必采取持续不断的军事行动来抵御试图从其客户那里收取保护费的竞争团体，它就可以以更少的成本提供更多的保护。

Achievement of a local monopoly of coercion not only allowed a government to more effectively protect its potential customers from violence initiated by others; it also greatly reduced the government’s operating costs. As Lane put it, “The violence-using, violence-controlling industry was a natural monopoly, at least on land. Within territorial limits, the service it rendered could be produced much more cheaply by a monopoly.”³³ Thus a “monopoly of the use of force within a contiguous territory enabled a protection-producing enterprise to improve its product and reduce its costs.”³⁴ Such a governing organization could offer more protection with less expense if it did not have to engage in incessant military actions to fend off competitive groups seeking to extract protection payments from its customers.

信息技术将有助于“放松”主权必须建立在领土垄断基础上的假设，这一前景已经引起了政治理论家的关注。这是大卫·J·埃尔金斯所著《超越主权：21 世纪的领土与政治经济》一书的主题。埃尔金斯赞同我们的论点，即垄断政府注定要被取消中介，就像 1500 年以后的宗教垄断一样。他写道：“我们过去认为宗教应该有自己的领土或‘地盘’。随着国家取代普世宗教成为生死的主权仲裁者，宗教的‘紧凑性’和‘界限性’让位于我们现在熟悉的同一地区信徒的混合。相反，我们拒绝容忍国家或省份的混合，尽管我相信这种假设正在被打破。” ³⁵他继续论证说，与我们的观点一致，领土主权垄断可以在不陷入无政府状态的情况下被打破，加拿大等联邦制国家和省级政府之间的主权分裂，以及本世纪大部分时间里一些太平洋岛屿的法国和英国联合主权共管政府就是明证。因此，虽然领土主权垄断很少被武力解除，但可以通过协议解除。根据埃尔金斯的说法，我们同意，“领土国家一直是我们生活其他方面的一个包裹或篮子。它类似于商品‘篮子’的经济概念——你不能轻易地单独获得物品，而必须将它们一起拿走。在餐馆里，你可以点‘点菜’；但就我们的身份而言，我们必须接受各国捆绑在一起的东西，这相当于‘套餐’。” …政府点菜对公民来说似乎是自然而然的二十一世纪。” ³⁶没有任何发展比完全超越物理边界的网络经济的出现更能显著地促进主权的瓦解和点菜式政府的崛起。

The prospect that information technology will help “relax” the assumption that sovereignty must be based upon a territorial monopoly has already attracted the attention of political theorists. It is the theme of Beyond Sovereignty: Territory and Political Economy in the Twenty-first Century, by David J. Elkins. Elkins echoes our thesis that monopoly governments are destined to be disintermediated much as religious monopolies were in the years following 1500. He writes: “We used to assume that religions should have their own territory or ‘turf.’ As nations replaced universal religions as the sovereign arbiters of life and death, the ‘compactness’ and ‘boundedness’ of religion gave way to our now familiar intermingling of believers in the same area. Instead, we refuse to countenance the intermingling of nations, or provinces for that matter, although I believe this assumption is in the process of breaking down.”³⁵ He goes on to argue, in keeping with our view, that territorial monopolies on sovereignty can be broken down without anarchy, as evidenced by the split in sovereignty between national and provincial governments in a federal system like Canada’s, and by the condominium government involving joint French and British sovereignty that characterized some Pacific Islands for much of this century. Thus, while territorial monopolies on sovereignty have rarely been unbundled by force, they can be unbundled by agreement. According to Elkins, and we agree, “The territorial nation has been a bundle or basket into which other facets of our lives are fit. It is similar to the economic concept of a ‘basket’ of goods—you cannot easily get items individually but must take them collectively. In a restaurant, one can order ‘a la carte’; but as far as our identities are concerned, we must take what nations have bundled together, which amounts to ‘table d’hote.’… Government a la carte will seem natural to citizens in the twenty-first century.”³⁶ There is no development that will contribute more dramatically to the disaggregation of sovereignty and the rise of government a la carte than the emergence of a cybereconomy that altogether transcends physical borders.

“随着频率上升和波长下降，数字性能呈指数级提高。带宽上升，功耗下降，天线尺寸缩小，干扰减少，错误率下降”

—乔治·吉尔德

“As frequencies rise and wavelengths drop, digital performance improves exponentially. Bandwidth rises, power usage shrinks, antenna size shrinks, interference collapses, error rates plummet”

—GEORGE GILDER

电信法废除国际法​​​​​​​​

THE LAW OF THE TELECOSM REPEALS THE LAWS OF NATIONS

我们并不是唯一一个认为带宽（或通信媒体的承载能力）注定要超越领土国家的人。《500 年三角洲：之后会发生什么？接下来会发生什么》一书的作者吉姆·泰勒和瓦茨·瓦克尔没有像我们一样定义他们的论点，但他们清楚地看到“访问创造了全球化，而全球化通过使边界概念过时而破坏了政治体系。随着边界的消失，支持政府的税收概念变得越来越脆弱……随着边界的消失，权利的概念——认为因为你出生在某个地方，你就有权享受与这个地方相关的经济优势的信念——就会瓦解，而随着它的瓦解，国家地位的特权也会随之瓦解。随着这一切的发生，国家地位背后的理想——爱国主义、民主、国家、大熔炉、统一、负责任的参与，无论它们在哪个国家是什么——都会被扔进历史的垃圾堆里。” ³⁷虽然没有明确说明，但他们显然也感觉到历史正在走向主权个体的解放。正如他们所说，“一种比我们现在理解的民主更纯粹的个人主义即将出现。” ³⁸这将如何发生？泰勒和瓦克看到了一种强大的动力：

We are not alone in seeing that bandwidth (or the carrying capacity of communications media) is destined to trump the territorial state. Jim Taylor and Watts Wacker, authors of The 500-Year Delta: What Happens After What Comes Next, do not define their argument as we do, but they see clearly that “access creates globalism, and globalism disrupts political systems by making the concept of borders obsolete. As borders disappear, the concept of taxation, which supports governments, becomes increasingly fragile.… As borders disappear, the concept of entitlement—the belief that because you were born in a particular place, you are entitled to the economic advantages associated with that place—falls apart, and as it falls apart, the perks of nationhood fall apart with it. And as all that happens, the ideals that underlie nationhood—patriotism, democracy, the state, the melting pot, unification, responsible participation, whatever they happen to be in whatever nation one is living in—get relegated to the junk heap of history.”³⁷ Without saying so explicitly, they, too, apparently sense that history is moving toward the liberation of the Sovereign Individual. As they say, “On the horizon waits a much purer form of individualism than democracy as we now understand it allows.”³⁸ How will this happen? Taylor and Wacker see a powerful dynamic at work:

简单的事实是，更广泛的爱国主义意识——对国家的热爱、对国家的孝顺——不再是一种特别有用的倾向。……在全球社会中茁壮成长的公民将在全球范围内认同自己。他们将做出政治、社会和经济选择，而不是基于国家认同，而是基于这些选择与他们自己以及与世界各地与他们一样的人的直接关系。……蓬勃发展的国家和公司将相应地组织起来。他们将最大限度地自由地知道、去、做、成为。不这样做的国家和公司，如果继续基于怀旧情绪进行后卫行动，就会萎缩^。39

The simple fact is that the larger sense of patriotism—a love of nation, a sense of filial duty to it—is not a particularly useful predisposition to have any longer.… Citizens who thrive in the global society will identify themselves globally. They will make political, social, and economic choices based not on national identity, but on how those choices relate to themselves directly and to people like them around the world.… Nations and corporations who thrive will organize themselves accordingly. They will maximize the freedom to know, to go, to do, and to be. Nations and corporations that don’t, that continue to fight rear-guard actions based on nostalgia, will atrophy.³⁹

带宽每年增加三倍，互联网和万维网呈几何级数增长，这意味着物理边界的贬值，这将加速政府去中介化的过程。事实上，带宽每年增加三倍的趋势持续到 2012 年，意味着带宽自 1993 年以来将增长十亿倍，当时乔治·吉尔德首次提出带宽的增长速度将比微处理器的容量增长得更快。如果这一趋势成为现实——我们相信，根据集成光学领域最近的突破——那么将创造的大量通信能力将导致网络商务的惊人增长。借助波分复用技术，一根细如人发的光纤每秒可以传输一万亿比特。40换句话说，一条光缆可以承载的比特数^是全球所有通信网络总负载的二十五倍。扩展能力令人震惊。随着如此巨大的通信容量被释放，人们将花费更多的钱在通信上，因为通信将变得如此便宜。而专用电话和电视等既有媒体将成为过时的东西。万维网将向每台计算机提供比消费者今天通过网络电视体验到的更丰富的信号组合。随着带宽革命的展开，它将吸引越来越多的人进入在线社区和网络商务的无边界虚拟世界，这个世界的图形密度足以成为“元宇宙”，即科幻小说家尼尔·斯蒂芬森想象的那种另类的网络空间现实。斯蒂芬森的“元宇宙”是一个虚拟社区，有自己的法律、王子和恶棍。41^随着越来越多的经济活动被吸引到网络空间，国家在边界内的垄断权力的价值将缩水，使各国有越来越大的动机将其主权特许经营和分割。

The devaluation of physical borders implied by the tripling of bandwidth each year and the geometric growth of the Internet and World Wide Web will accelerate the process of disintermediating governments. Indeed, a continuation of the annual tripling of bandwidth until the year 2012 would imply a billionfold growth in bandwidth since 1993, when George Gilder first suggested that bandwidth was destined to compound even faster than the capacity of microprocessors. If this comes to pass—as we believe it will, to judge by recent breakthroughs in integrated optics—the abundance of communications capability that would be created would result in a fantastic increase in cybercommerce. With wave division multiplexing, a single fiber strand, as thin as a human hair, has the capacity to carry one trillion bits per second.⁴⁰ In other words, a single fiber optic cable could accommodate twenty-five times more bits than the total load of all of the world’s communications networks combined. The capacity for expansion is stupefying. With this much communications capacity unleashed, vastly more money will be spent on communication because it will be so cheap. And such established media as dedicated telephony and television will become anachronisms. The World Wide Web will deliver a richer mix of signals to every computer than consumers experience with network television today. As the bandwidth revolution unfolds, it will draw people more and more into the borderless virtual world of online communities and cybercommerce, a world with enough graphic density to become the “metaverse,” the kind of alternative, cyberspace reality imagined by the science fiction novelist Neal Stephenson. Stephenson’s “metaverse” is a virtual community with its own laws, princes, and villains.⁴¹ As ever more economic activity is drawn into cyberspace, the value of the state’s monopoly power within borders will shrink, giving states a growing incentive to franchise and fragment their sovereignty.

正如当今的民族国家有动力建立自由港、自由贸易区和自由区一样，它们也将有动力出租其主权。我们已经讨论了具有九百年历史的耶路撒冷、罗得岛和马耳他圣约翰主权军事医院骑士团（通常称为马耳他骑士团）与马耳他共和国之间关于归还圣安杰洛堡主权的谈判进展顺利。我们预计这些谈判将顺利结束。其他国家也将效仿。一些民族国家将把小飞地和偏远地区的主权割让给全新的亲和团体和虚拟社区。事实上，商业实体（如保安公司和连锁酒店）竞标小块领土的主权并非不可能。Wackenhut、Pinkerton 和 Argenbright 未来可能会提供混合封闭式退休社区和免税区，遍布世界各地宜人的气候。宗教实体，如马耳他骑士团，代表着每一个可以想象到的教派，将以自己的方式试图在地球上某些偏僻的角落里实现天堂。即使是富有的个人和家庭也会拥有自己的土地，在那里他们将行使有限的主权，发行自己的邮票和护照，并维护一个网站。

Just as nation-states today have incentives to host free ports, free-trade zones, and zona francas, so they will have incentives to lease their sovereignty. We have already discussed the well-advanced negotiations between the nine-hundred-year-old Sovereign Military Hospitaller Order of St. John of Jerusalem, of Rhodes and of Malta, more commonly known as the Knights of Malta, and the Republic of Malta to return sovereignty over Fort St. Angelo to the order. We expect these negotiations to be successfully concluded. Others will follow. Some nation-states will cede sovereignty over small enclaves and remote areas to entirely new affinity groups and virtual communities. Indeed, it is not unlikely that commercial entities, such as security firms and hotel chains, will bid for sovereignty over small patches of territory. Wackenhut, Pinkerton, and Argenbright may, in the future, offer hybrid gated retirement communities and tax-free zones in attractive climates around the world. Religious entities, like the Knights of Malta, but representing every conceivable denomination, will try in their own ways to make heaven incarnate in certain out-of-the-way corners of the earth. Even wealthy individuals and families will possess their own plots where they will exercise limited sovereignty, issue their own stamps and passports, and maintain a Web site.

垄断与掠夺​

MONOPOLY AND PLUNDER

请注意，分享或租用主权的动机与历史上那些面临军事竞争的统治者在当地垄断强制手段的情况下面临的动机截然不同。租用主权并不比设立自由贸易区更不稳定。相比之下，军阀和游击队之间的军事权力竞争直接影响到未来的政府是否有更强烈的动机去保护其控制范围内的人民或掠夺他们。当竞争团体在难以平衡的情况下角力和调动时，使用掠夺性暴力的动机就会增加。掠夺变得更具吸引力。由于权力不太稳定，当地垄断强制手段不太牢固，那些有能力使用暴力的人的时间范围就会缩小。“山中之王”可能站在如此危险的斜坡上，以至于他无法指望自己能存活足够长的时间来实现最终遏制暴力所带来的巨大收益。在这种情况下，几乎没有什么可以阻止那些指挥政府的人利用他们的权力恐吓和掠夺社会。

Note that the incentives to share or lease sovereignty for a fee are quite different from those that have historically faced rulers exposed to military competition with their local monopoly of coercion. Leased sovereignty is no more destabilizing than hosting a free-trade zone. By contrast, military competition for power, of the kind pursued by battling warlords and guerrilla bands, directly affects whether the would-be government has stronger incentives to protect people within its grasp or to plunder them. Where contending groups wrestle and maneuver in uneasy balance, the incentives to use predatory violence increase. Plunder becomes more attractive. Because power is less stable, and the local monopoly of coercion less secure, the time horizons of those with the capacity to employ violence shrinks. The “king of the mountain” may stand on such a slippery slope that he could not expect to survive long enough to realize a share of the substantial gains that ultimately result from containing violence. When that is the case, there is little to prevent those who command what passes for government from employing their power to terrorize and pillage society.

因此，武力逻辑告诉我们，任何领土上相互竞争的武装团体越多，它们诉诸掠夺性暴力的可能性就越大。如果没有一个压倒性的力量来镇压自由暴力，这种暴力就会不断扩散，经济和社会合作的许多成果就会化为泡影。

The logic of force, therefore, tells you that the more competing armed groups there are operating in any territory, the higher the likelihood that they will resort to predatory violence. Without a single overwhelming power to suppress freelance violence, it tends to proliferate, and many of the gains of economic and social cooperation go up in smoke.

在无政府状态下，暴力完全盛行可能造成的破坏，在 20 世纪 20 年代军阀统治下的中国所经历的命运中得到了证明。这是我们在《大清算》中讲述的故事。相互竞争的军阀在没有单一、压倒性力量制衡的地区造成了巨大破坏。CNN 新闻记者勇敢地走上索马里摩加迪沙的街头，向全世界生动地报道了类似的故事，说明了类似的观点。索马里军阀的武装部队绰号为“技术军”，在美国领导大规模军事干预以遏制他们之前，他们给这个悲惨的国家带来了无政府状态。当美国军队的指挥权撤回后，技术军民众再次拿起武器，无政府状态又恢复了。《华盛顿邮报》的一篇报道称：

The damage that can occur when violence is given full reign in a condition of anarchy is demonstrated by the fate of China under the warlords in the 1920s. It is a story we recounted in The Great Reckoning. The competing warlords imposed great damage in areas where there was no single, overwhelming power to keep them in check. Similar stories illustrating a similar point have been broadcast to the world in living color by CNN news crews braving the streets of Mogadishu, Somalia. The armed forces of Somalia’s warlords, nicknamed the “technicals,” brought anarchy to that sad country before the United States led a massive military intervention to contain them. When the commanding might of U.S. forces was withdrawn, the technicals brought out their weapons again, and anarchy resumed. A report in the Washington Post observed:

装载着高射炮的皮卡再次在尘土飞扬、碎石遍地的街道上行驶。身穿 T 恤、肩扛卡拉什尼科夫步枪的气势汹汹的年轻人也回来了，他们在临时路障处向过往的汽车和公共汽车勒索钱财。这里一个民兵控制的社区武装非常强大，当地人称之为“波斯尼亚和黑塞哥维那”。

如今，在这座城市的贫民窟中穿行，让人不禁想起 1992 年的情景。当时，敌对民兵之间的混乱战争使索马里陷入无政府状态，饥荒促使美国领导的军事干预。同样，要穿越摩加迪沙，旅行者必须雇佣一车武装暴徒，希望他们能以每天 100 美元的价格提供保护，外加午餐时间^。42

[P]ickup trucks mounted with antiaircraft guns are once again plowing the dusty, rubble-strewn streets. Back too are the swaggering young men in T-shirts and Kalashnikov rifles slung over their shoulders, extorting money from passing cars and buses at makeshift roadblocks. One militia-controlled neighborhood here is so heavily armed that locals refer to it as “Bosnia-Herzegovina.”

Travelling around this city’s mean streets today is strikingly reminiscent of the days in 1992, when chaotic warfare among rival militias plunged Somalia into anarchy and a famine that prompted a U.S.-led military intervention. Once again, to traverse Mogadishu, travelers must hire a carload of armed thugs, hoping they will deliver protection for a hundred bucks a day, plus time off for lunch.⁴²

索马里、卢旺达和你很快会在电视上看到的其他国家的例子，提供了生动的证明，即为控制领土而展开的暴力竞争不会像其他形式的竞争那样产生直接的经济收益。恰恰相反。在无政府状态下竞争的流氓和劫掠者甚至缺乏保护生产活动的微弱动机，而这种动机有时甚至可以减轻独裁者在统治稳固时的严厉手段。

The examples of Somalia, Rwanda, and others you will soon see on television offer a Technicolor proof that violent competition for control of territory does not yield the same immediate economic gains as other forms of competition. To the contrary. The roving bandits and looters who compete under anarchy lack even the weak incentives to protect productive activity that sometimes lighten even the heavy hand of dictators when their rule is secure.

“我们所谓的现代社会，尤其是在西方，具有一定程度的垄断特征。个人被剥夺了自由使用军事武器的权利，而只能由某种中央权力机构行使，同样，个人财产或收入的征税也集中在中央社会权力机构手中。流入这一中央权力机构的财政手段维持了其对军事力量的垄断，而这反过来又维持了税收的垄断。两者在任何意义上都没有优先于对方；它们是同一垄断的两个方面。如果一方消失，另一方也会自动随之消失；垄断规则有时可能在一方受到的动摇比另一方更强烈” ⁴³

—诺伯特·埃利亚斯

“The society of what we call the modern age is characterized, above all in the West, by a certain level of monopolization. Free use of military weapons is denied the individual and reserved to a central authority of whatever kind, and likewise the taxation of the property or income of individuals is concentrated in the hands of a central social authority. The financial means thus flowing into this central authority maintain its monopoly of military force, while this in turn maintains the monopoly of taxation. Neither has in any sense precedence over the other; they are two sides of the same monopoly. If one disappears the other automatically follows; the monopoly rule may sometimes be shaken more strongly on one side than on the other”⁴³

—NORBERT ELIAS

保护的演变​​​

THE EVOLUTION OF PROTECTION

莱恩提出了一个论点，我们滥用这个论点来想象信息时代将如何展开。他认为，西方经济自黑暗时代以来的历史可以这样解释：暴力组织中的竞争和垄断的四个阶段。虽然莱恩在很大程度上没有提及我们认为影响政府运作规模的超级政治因素，但他对暴力经济学的探索与我们在《街头血腥》、《大清算》和本书其他部分中阐述的论点非常吻合。

Lane developed an argument that we have misappropriated for our purposes in imagining how the Information Age may unfold. He argued that the history of Western economies since the Dark Ages can be interpreted in terms of four stages of competition and monopoly in the organization of violence. While Lane is largely silent about the megapolitical factors that we identify as influencing the scale at which governments operate, his exploration of the economics of violence coincides closely with the argument we spelled out in Blood in the Streets and The Great Reckoning, and elsewhere in this volume.

我们已经分析了罗马帝国衰亡后西方社会演变过程中的一些大政治因素。莱恩还研究了这一时期，重点研究了垄断暴力的竞争所带来的经济后果。他辨别出过去一千年经济运作的四个重要阶段，每个阶段都涉及暴力组织的不同阶段。^二

We have already analyzed some of the megapolitical factors that played a role in the evolution of Western society following the fall of Rome. Lane also examined this period, focusing on the economic consequences of that competition to monopolize violence. He discerned four important stages in the functioning of economies over the past thousand years, each involving a different phase in the organization of violence.^II

走出黑暗时代

Out of the Dark Ages

第一阶段是“无政府和掠夺”阶段，标志着一千年前的封建革命。虽然莱恩没有具体说明他总结的任何时期的具体日期，但算术非常清楚地设定了他的第一阶段的界限，他对“无政府和掠夺”阶段的描述似乎符合从黑暗时代过渡的条件，当时暴力的使用“竞争激烈，甚至在陆地上也是如此”。44^他没有说明原因，但当暴力“竞争激烈”时，这通常意味着在任何距离投射力量方面都存在重大障碍。从军事角度来看，防御比进攻更重要。

The first stage is one of “anarchy and plunder” that marked the feudal revolution of a thousand years ago. While Lane does not specify the dates for any of his summary periods, arithmetic sets the boundary of his first period quite clearly, and his description of the stage of “anarchy and plunder” seems to match conditions during the transition from the Dark Ages when the use of violence was “highly competitive, even on land.”⁴⁴ He does not say why, but when violence is “highly competitive,” this usually means that there are significant obstacles to the projection of power at any distance. In military terms, defense is predominant over the offense.

出于我们在第三章中解释的原因，这一“无政府状态和掠夺”阶段恰逢农业生产力因气候变化而下降。由于当时技术无法提供有效的规模经济来帮助确保暴力垄断，因此潜在统治者之间的竞争十分普遍。经济活动受到抑制。

For reasons we explained in Chapter 3, this stage of “anarchy and plunder” coincided with falling productivity of agriculture due to adverse climatic changes. Since technology offered few effective economies of scale to help in securing a monopoly of violence at the time, competition between would-be rulers was widespread. Economic activity was smothered.

经济疲软使建立稳定秩序的问题更加严重。要建立暴力的局部垄断，军事活动的成本与微薄的经济营业额成正比，实在是太高了。由于没有能力在经济上可行的领土上实施有效的垄断，骑马的武装骑士们只能恐吓和掠夺，却无法为他们的客户提供任何“保护”。

The weakness of the economy made the problem of establishing a stable order worse. To create a local monopoly of violence involved too high a cost in military activity in proportion to the meager value of economic turnover. Without the capacity to enforce an effective monopoly over an economically viable territory, the armed knights on horseback terrorized and plundered while providing little in the way of “protection” for their customers.

封建

Feudalism

“第二阶段始于建立小型区域或省级垄断。农业产量随之上升，大部分剩余产品⁴⁵尽管如此，第二阶段的盈余相对较少，我们将其定义为中世纪早期。由于暴力组织缺乏规模优势，经济增长受到抑制，这使得执行地方垄断的军事成本居高不下。但是，虽然成本仍然很高，但小主权国家可以收取的保护费用却在上升，因为当无政府状态受到限制时，经济活动就会扩大。

“The second stage begins when small regional or provincial monopolies are established. Agricultural production then rises, and most of the surplus is collected by recently established monopolists of violence.”⁴⁵ Still, the surplus is relatively meager during this second stage, which we identify with the early Middle Ages. Economic growth is held down by the absence of advantages of scale in the organization of violence, which keeps the military costs of enforcing local monopolies high. But while the costs remain high, the price that minisovereignties can charge for protection rises, since economic activity expands when anarchy is curtailed.

“在第二阶段的后期，许多收贡者通过向农业和商业企业提供特殊优惠来吸引客户。他们以低价为那些将新土地用于耕种的人提供保护，并提供特殊的治安服务以鼓励贸易，例如香槟伯爵为参加集市的商人组织的贸易。” ⁴⁶换句话说，当他们能够建立足够的领土控制权以进行可信的谈判时，当地军阀会做当地商人在需要增加市场份额时会做的事情：他们打折服务以吸引客户。军阀后来利用额外经济活动带来的额外资源来巩固对更大领土的控制。一旦这种控制牢固确立，他们就开始享受更多的垄断优势。他们的军事治安成本趋于下降，他们也可以提高收费，而不必担心这会降低他们的服务对客户的吸引力。

“During a late phase of the second stage many tribute takers attract customers by special offers to agricultural and commercial enterprise. They offer protection at low prices for those who will bring new lands into cultivation, and special policing services to encourage trade such as that organized by the Counts of Champagne for merchants coming to their fairs.”⁴⁶ In other words, when they were able to establish a sufficient control over territory to negotiate credibly, local warlords did what local merchants do when they need to increase market share: they discounted their services to attract customers. The warlords later used the added resources from additional economic activity to consolidate their control over larger territories. Once that control was firmly established, they began to enjoy more of the advantages of monopoly. Their military costs for policing tended to fall, and they could also increase the price they charged without worrying that this made their service less attractive to customers.

在西方历史的这个复杂阶段，那些使用暴力的人，即中世纪的领主和君主，占据了除生活费以外的大部分剩余收入。商人很少。最成功的人是那些最善于逃避或尽量减少那些索要“保护服务”费用的人所征收的税费和其他费用的人。

In this complicated stage in Western history, those who employ violence, the medieval lords and monarchs, take most of the surplus above subsistence. There are few merchants. The most successful are those who are best able to evade or minimize the taxes, fees, and other costs imposed by those demanding money for “protection services.”

近代

The Early-Modern Period

当并非暴力专家的商人和地主“比封建主和君主获得更多的经济剩余时，就进入了第三阶段……在第三阶段，专门使用暴力的企业获得的剩余比从政府购买保护的企业要少。” ⁴⁷由于成功的商人更有可能将利润再投资而不是消费掉，因此，这一历史阶段商人的较高利润导致了自我强化的增长。

A third stage is reached when the merchants and landowners who are not also specialists in violence “are getting more of the economy’s surplus than are fief holders and monarchs.… In this third stage, the enterprises specializing in the use of violence receive less of the surplus than do enterprises that buy protection from the governments.”⁴⁷ Since successful merchants are more likely to reinvest their profits than consume them, the higher profits of merchants in that stage in history led to self-reinforcing growth.

工厂时代

The Factory Age

莱恩认为，从第三阶段到第四阶段的过渡，是技术和工业创新的出现，这些创新是赚取利润比降低保护成本更重要的因素。莱恩似乎指的是 1750 年以来的时期。从那时起，贸易的特点技术开始在地区繁荣中发挥明显的主导作用。举一个极端的例子，即使是没有政府的地区，例如 1840 年之前新西兰的某些地区，也不太可能仅仅因为不纳税而变得非常繁荣。在那个历史时期，工业技术创新对于实现利润比通过降低保护成本（甚至降低到零）而获得的任何节省都更为重要。随着政府规模的扩大，最初由政府为筹集军事行动资源而首创的信贷和融资机制开始为更大规模的商业企业提供资金。

Lane identifies the passage from the third to the fourth stage with the emergence of technological and industrial innovations as more important factors in earning profits than lowering the costs of protection. By this, Lane seems to refer to the period since 1750. From that time on, the character of technology began to play a clearly dominating role in the prosperity of regions. To take an extreme case, even areas where no government existed at all, as was the case in some parts of New Zealand, for example, prior to 1840, were not likely to become highly prosperous simply because they paid no taxes. At that point in history, innovations in industrial technology were more important to achieving profits than any savings that could be had by lowering the costs for protection, even to zero. As the scale of government rose, the credit and financing mechanisms originally pioneered by governments to raise resources for military operations became available to finance business enterprises of larger scale.

虽然莱恩没有这么说，但技术优势集中在特定地区会减少管辖区之间的竞争，并让“专门使用暴力的企业”或政府能够收取更高的价格。当一个管辖区与另一个管辖区之间的竞争对手之间存在巨大技术差距时（如工业时代的情况），拥有最先进技术的管辖区的企业家往往会赚更多的钱，即使他们可能必须向政府缴纳更高的税款和其他成本。

Although Lane does not say so, the concentration of technological advantages in a given locale reduced the competition between jurisdictions and allowed “enterprises specializing in the use of violence,” or governments, to charge higher prices. When there are large technological gaps between the competitors in one jurisdiction and another, as there were during the Industrial Age, entrepreneurs in the jurisdictions with the best technology tend to make more money, even though they may have to pay higher taxes and other costs to their governments.

微笑掠夺

Plunder with a Smile

工业时代的政府享有令人愉悦的垄断权。相对于他们收取的价格（税收），他们提供生命和肢体保护的实际成本微不足道。然而，他们实际上处于一个竞争如此不合理的领域，以至于他们可以更多地从事掠夺而不是保护业务，而这一事实几乎不会被注意到。这是历史上罕见的时刻。

Governments in the Industrial Age enjoyed a delightful monopoly to exploit. Their actual costs for providing protection of life and limb were vanishingly small relative to the prices (taxes) they charged. Yet they really were in a realm where competition was so perverse that they could engage far more in the business of plunder than in that of protection and still have that fact go all but unnoticed. It was a rare moment in history.

在工业主义的超级政治条件下，无政府状态的弊端使得在同一领土内进行保护服务竞争在技术上不可行。在这种条件下，实现有效保护的唯一方法是掌握更大的使用暴力的能力。因此，试图更好地区分税收中“作为提供服务的报酬”的部分（用莱恩的话来说）和“人们倾向于称之为掠夺的另一部分”是没有什么好处的。48^这种区别确实足够真实。但由于无论如何都要纳税，因此充分发展它除了满足病态的好奇心之外没有什么值得称赞的。正如莱恩所说，无论税收中哪一部分是掠夺，它们都是人们必须付出的代价“以避免更严重的损失” ^。49

The drawbacks of anarchy under the megapolitical conditions of industrialism made competition in protection services within the same territory technologically infeasible. The only way to achieve effective protection under those conditions was to command a greater capability to employ violence. Therefore there was little to be gained by attempting to better distinguish that portion of one’s taxes that went, in Lane’s words, “as payment for the service rendered” from “another part that one is tempted to call plunder.”⁴⁸ The distinction was surely real enough. But since one was stuck paying the taxes in any event, developing it fully had little to commend it other than satisfying morbid curiosity. As Lane said, no matter what portion of the taxes was plunder they were a price one had to pay “to avoid more severe losses.”⁴⁹

工业化下的收入增长

The Rise of Incomes Under Industrialism

在过去两个世纪民族国家统治时期，这种困境之所以可以容忍，部分原因是收入大幅增长，尤其是在大多数工业发展受到限制的地区。经合组织政府的领导人几乎每年都拿走更高比例的收入。但掠夺的增加却伴随着更大的繁荣，以及与世界其他地区的财富差距扩大。在这种情况下，对税收激增的反对必然是微不足道的，不足以阻止事态偏离其逻辑发展。事实上，出于前几章中阐述的原因，一个工业民族国家的军事生存在很大程度上取决于这样一个事实：它对其公民资源的索取权没有有效的限制。

Part of the reason this dilemma was tolerable during the past two centuries of domination by the nation-state was the fact that incomes were rising dramatically, particularly in the jurisdictions where most industrial development was confined. Those running the OECD governments took a higher percentage of incomes almost every year. But the increase in plunder was nonetheless accompanied by far greater prosperity, and a greater inequality of wealth with the rest of the world. Under such conditions, objections to the surge of taxation were inevitably marginal and insufficient to deflect events from their logical progression. Indeed, for reasons spelled out in previous chapters, the military survival of an industrial nation-state largely depended upon the fact that no effective limits could be placed upon its claims on the resources of its citizens.

在每个工业国家，政策都或多或少地朝着同一个方向发展。在第二次世界大战后工业化的高峰时期，边际所得税率达到 90% 或更高。这是对国家开采资源权利的更为激进的主张，甚至比早期水利文明的东方专制君主更甚。然而，工业版的掠夺遵循着自己的逻辑。其中很大一部分是由我们之前描述的 20 世纪上半叶工业技术的特征决定的。

In every industrial state, policies meandered in more or less the same direction. At the high-water mark of industrialism after World War II, the rate of marginal income taxes reached 90 percent or higher. This was a far more aggressive assertion of the right of the state to extract resources than even the Oriental despots of the early hydraulic civilizations were prone to make. Yet the industrial version of plunder followed its own logic. Much of it was determined by the character of industrial technology in the first half of the twentieth century that we described earlier.

这项技术几乎不可避免地使国家攫取并重新分配了很大一部分收入，而大部分掠夺的负担都落在了一小部分资本家身上。大多数工业过程严重依赖自然资源，因此与资源所在地息息相关。钢厂、矿山或港口只能以惊人的成本搬迁，或者根本不搬迁。因此，这些设施是很容易征税的固定目标。本世纪，财产税、公司税和离岸税急剧增加。所得税也是如此，首先是资本家，最终是工人自己。大规模工业就业的出现使广泛的所得税成为现实。工资可以从源头扣押，税务机关与工业企业的会计部门协调征收。我们今天认为这是理所当然的，但在工厂门口征收所得税要比分散到农村从数百万独立工匠和农民那里榨取一部分利润简单得多。

This technology made it all but inevitable that the state would seize and redistribute a large fraction of income, with much of the burden of the plunder falling upon a small segment of capitalists. Most industrial processes were heavily dependent on natural resources, and therefore tied to the sites where the resources were located. A steel mill, a mine, or a port could be moved only at staggering expense, or not at all. Such facilities were therefore stationary targets that could easily be taxed. Property, corporate, and severance taxes grew sharply over this century. So did income taxes, first on the capitalists, but eventually on the workers themselves. The advent of large-scale industrial employment made a broadly based income tax practical. Wages could be garnished at the source, with the tax authorities coordinating collections with the accounting departments of industrial firms. We take this for granted today, but collecting an income tax at the factory gate was a far simpler task than fanning out over the countryside to squeeze a portion of the profits from millions of independent craftsmen and farmers.

简而言之，工业技术使征税比许多早期征税更加常规化、更加可预测、对个人的危害更小。尽管如此，它抽取的社会资源比例比以往任何形式的主权都要高。

In short, industrial technology tended to make taxation more routinized, more predictable, and less personally dangerous than taxation in many earlier periods. Nonetheless, it extracted a higher percentage of society’s resources than any form of sovereignty had done before.

保护什么？

Protecting What?

社会变得更加富裕，而税收占收入的比重却大幅上升，这一事实引发了人们对政府为工业经济体提供的保护性质的质疑。他们保护的是什么？我们的答案是：主要是资本成本高、易受攻击的工业设施。在竞争激烈的混乱环境中，大型工业企业的存在是不可能的，即使竞争的结果是政府所占的产出份额减少。

The fact that societies could become richer while the total percentage of income absorbed in taxes rose significantly invites a question about the character of the protection that governments provided to industrial economies. What were they protecting? Our answer: primarily industrial installations with high capital costs and significant vulnerability to attack. The presence of large-scale industrial firms would not have been possible in a disordered environment with more competitive violence, even if the result of the competition had been to shrink the overall share of output taken by government.

这就是为什么资本密集型企业在美国贫民窟以及临时暴力盛行的第三世界社会中不具经济效益。工业社会作为一个整体能够继续发展，是因为建立并维持了某种秩序。企业受到的是定期、可预测的勒索，而不是不稳定的暴力。

This is why capital-intensive operations are uneconomic in the American slums, as well as in Third World societies where ad hoc violence is endemic. Industrial society as a whole was able to proceed because a certain kind of order was established and maintained. Enterprises were subject to regular, predictable shakedowns, rather than erratic violence.

即使在工业化鼎盛时期，说政府使用“武力垄断”也总是言过其实。所有政府都试图维持这种垄断，但正如我们所见，工业公司的员工通常发现他们能够对雇主使用暴力。只要普通民众能够获得任何武器，或者混乱的人群仍然有能力推翻公共汽车或向警察扔石头，控制政府的人就不能完全垄断武力。他们只是控制着主导力量，这种主导地位使得大多数人在现有条件下与他们竞争是不经济的。

Even during the height of industrialism, it was always an exaggeration to speak of a government employing a “monopoly of force.” All governments try to maintain such a monopoly, but as we have seen, employees of industrial corporations usually found that they were able to employ violence against their employers. As long as the general public has access to any arms at all, or a disorderly crowd retains the physical capacity to overturn a bus or throw rocks at police, those who control the government do not totally monopolize force. They merely control predominant force, dominant to a degree that it becomes uneconomic for most people to compete with them under existing conditions.

“基于网络的政府只有在被统治者的同意下才能运作。因此，任何网络政府如果想让公民留下来，就必须为他们提供真正的好处。这些好处可能不仅仅是个人商品或服务，而是监管制度的更广泛好处：一个干净、透明、规则和后果明确的市场，或一个受监督的社区，孩子们可以信任他们遇到的人，个人隐私受到保护。” ⁵⁰

—埃丝特·戴森

“A Net-based government can operate only by consent of the governed. Any Net government must therefore provide its citizens with real benefits if it wants them to stick around. Those benefits may not be just personal goods or services, but rather the broader benefits of a regulatory regime: a clean, transparent marketplace with defined rules and consequences, or a supervised community where children can trust the people they encounter of individual's privacy is protected.”⁵⁰

—ESTHER DYSON

信息时代

The Information Age

信息时代正在使西方暴力竞争演进的第五阶段成为现实。这一阶段是人们没有预料到的作者：Lane。第五阶段涉及网络空间的竞争，这是一个不受任何“使用暴力的企业”垄断的领域。它不受垄断，因为它不是一个领土。

The Information Age is bringing into being a fifth stage in the evolution of competition in the use of violence in the West. This stage was not anticipated by Lane. This fifth phase involves competition in cyberspace, an arena not subject to monopolization by any “violence-using enterprise.” It is not subject to monopolization because it is not a territory.

尽管莱恩的论点包含了战后关于民族国家必然性的传统假设，但他认识到一个问题，这一问题对于理解未来将比四五十年前更为重要。那就是政府从未在公海上建立过稳定的强制垄断。想想看。没有哪家政府的法律专门适用于公海。这对于理解随着经济向网络空间迁移，暴力和保护的组织将如何演变至关重要。莱恩在观察中指出，没有哪家政府能够垄断海上暴力，出于同样的原因，政府更不可能成功地垄断一个没有物理边界的无限领域。

Although Lane’s argument incorporates conventional postwar assumptions about the inevitability of the nation-state, he recognized a point that will be more crucial to understanding the future than it may have seemed forty or fifty years ago. That is the fact that governments have never established stable monopolies of coercion over the open sea. Think about it. No government’s laws have ever exclusively applied there. This is a matter of the utmost importance in understanding how the organization of violence and protection will evolve as the economy migrates into cyberspace, which has no physical existence at all. For the same reasons that Lane noted in observing that no government has ever been able to monopolize violence on the sea, it is even less likely that a government could successfully monopolize an infinite realm without physical boundaries.

无政府状态的竞争​​​

COMPETITION WITHOUT ANARCHY

过去，当任何单一暴力实体难以建立垄断时，结果就是无政府状态和掠夺。然而，信息时代已经深刻改变了组织暴力的技术条件。过去，无法垄断某个地区的保护意味着更高的军事成本和更低的经济回报，而现在，政府无法垄断网络空间实际上意味着更低的军事成本和更高的经济回报。这是因为信息技术为保护创造了一个新的维度。有史以来第一次，信息技术允许创建和保护完全不受任何单个政府的暴力地域垄断范围的资产。

In the past, when conditions made it difficult for any single violence-wielding entity to establish a monopoly, the results were anarchy and plunder. The Information Age, however, has changed the technological terms under which violence is organized and done so in a profound way. Unlike the past, when the inability to monopolize protection in a region meant higher military costs and lower economic returns, the fact that governments cannot monopolize cyberspace actually implies lower military costs and higher economic returns. This is because information technology creates a new dimension in protection. For the first time in history, information technology allows for the creation and protection of assets that lie entirely outside the realm of any individual government’s territorial monopoly on violence.

“政治权力和治理单位多元化、缺乏集中、稳定、不受挑战的司法和权力监督来源的国家，必须制定自己的工作方案来处理由这种边界引起的问题。” ⁵¹

—R EES D AVIES

"Countries in which the units of political power and governance are multiple and which lack a central, stable, unchallenged supervisory source of jurisdiction and power have to devise their own working solutions for dealing with the problems raised by such frontiers."⁵¹

—REES DAVIES

与边疆的类比

The Analogy with the Frontier

从某种意义上说，网络空间相当于中世纪边境地区那种受技术保护的边境地区。在过去，当领主和国王的势力范围较弱，且边境地区有一个或多个领主的领土主张重叠时，就会存在类似于竞争性政府的现象。了解边境地区的运作方式可以深入了解边境法律或类似法律如何迁移到网络空间。

Cyberspace is in one sense the equivalent of a technologically protected march region of the kind that existed in border areas during the Middle Ages. In the past, when the reach of lords and kings was weak, and the claims of one or more overlapped at a frontier, something akin to competitive government existed. A look at how the march regions functioned could give insights into how laws of the march or something like them may migrate into cyberspace.

安道尔仍是法国和西班牙之间僵化的边境地区，是超级政治条件的产物，在这种条件下，任何一个王国都很难在比利牛斯山脉这片 190 平方英里的寒冷且几乎人迹罕至的地区统治另一个王国。1278 年，法国和西班牙的封建领主——法国的富瓦伯爵和西班牙的乌格尔主教达成协议，将安道尔的宗主权分割给当地的法国和西班牙封建领主。他们各自任命了两名“维基耶人”中的一人，这些“维基耶人”谨慎地行使安道尔政府的最低限度权力，主要是指挥小小的安道尔民兵，现在已经是警察部队。伯爵的角色早已被历史所取代。现在，法国政府在巴黎代替他。法国政府的职责之一是接受安道尔每年缴纳的一半贡品，这笔钱还不到廉价公寓一个月的房租。乌格尔的主教继续获得自己应得的那份贡税，就像中世纪他的前任们一样。

Andorra survives as a kind of fossilized march region between France and Spain, an artifact of megapolitical conditions that made it difficult for either kingdom to dominate the other in that cold and almost inaccessible area of 190 square miles in the Pyrenees. In 1278, an agreement was struck dividing suzerainty over Andorra between local French and Spanish feudal lords, the French count of Foix and the Spanish bishop of Urgel. Each appointed one of two “viquiers” who sparingly exercised the minimal authority of government in Andorra, mostly by commanding the tiny Andorran militia, now a police force. The count’s role was long ago superseded by history. The French government now stands in for him from Paris. Among its duties is to accept half of the annual tribute that Andorra pays, an amount less than a single month’s rent in a fleabag apartment. The bishop of Urgel continues to receive his share of the tribute, just as his predecessors did in the Middle Ages.

正如分裂贡品所暗示的那样，安道尔的“监督管辖权和权力”有两个来源，而不是一个。安道尔民事诉讼的上诉传统上要么向乌格尔主教学院提出，要么向巴黎最高法院提出。

As the split tribute implies, there have been two sources of “supervisory jurisdiction and power” rather than one in Andorra. Appeals from Andorran civil suits were traditionally lodged either with the Episcopal College of Urgel or the Court of Cassation in Paris.

安道尔模棱两可的立场导致安道尔几乎没有颁布任何法律。七百多年来，安道尔一直享有极小的政府和免税政策。如今，这让它作为避税天堂的吸引力与日俱增。但直到上一代人之前，安道尔还是出了名的贫穷。这里曾经森林茂密，但几个世纪以来，居民为了在严冬中取暖，砍伐了森林。每年 11 月到次年 4 月，整个地方都被大雪封山。即使在夏天，安道尔也非常寒冷，只有南坡才能生长庄稼。如果我们的描述让它看起来没有吸引力，那么你刚刚了解了它成功的秘诀。安道尔之所以能在民族国家时代作为封建飞地幸存下来，是因为它地处偏远，一贫如洗。

A consequence of Andorra’s ambiguous position was that almost no laws were enacted. Andorra has enjoyed vanishingly small government and no taxes for more than seven hundred years. Today, that gives it a growing appeal as a tax haven. But until a generation ago, Andorra was famously poor. Once thickly wooded, it was deforested over the centuries by residents trying to stay warm in the bitter winters. The whole place is snowed shut from November through April each year. Even in summer, Andorra is so cold that crops grow only on the southern slopes. If our description makes it seem unappealing, you have just learned the secret of its success. Andorra survived as a feudal enclave in the age of the nation-state because it was remote and dirt-poor.

中世纪曾有无数的边境或“边界”地区，主权国家混杂在一起。这些暴力边界在欧洲边境地区持续了几十年，有时甚至几个世纪。大多数边境地区都很贫穷。正如我们之前提到的，爱尔兰的凯尔特人和英格兰人控制的地区之间有边界；威尔士和英格兰之间、苏格兰和英国、意大利和法国、法国和西班牙、德国和中欧斯拉夫边境以及西班牙的基督教王国和格拉纳达的伊斯兰王国之间。与安道尔一样，这些边境地区发展出了独特的制度和法律形式，我们很可能在下一个千年再次看到这种形式。

At one time, there were numerous medieval frontier or “march” regions where sovereignties blended together. These violent frontiers persisted for decades or sometimes for centuries in the border areas of Europe. Most were poor. As we mentioned earlier, there were marches between areas of Celtic and English control in Ireland; between Wales and England, Scotland and England, Italy and France, France and Spain, Germany and the Slav frontiers of Central Europe, and between the Christian kingdoms of Spain and the Islamic kingdom of Granada. Like Andorra, these march regions developed distinct institutional and legal forms of a kind that we are likely to see again in the next millennium.

由于两大权力机构的竞争地位都较弱，统治者有时甚至会从其臣民中招募志愿者，让他们定居在边疆地区，以扩大其权力范围。几乎理所当然的是，免征税会诱使臣民定居在边疆地区。鉴于他们之间的竞争十分微妙，如果边疆地区任何一个权力机构试图征税，他都会让其追随者更加难以维持生计，同时也让每个人都有理由加入其竞争对手。因此，边疆地区的居民通常可以选择遵守谁的法律。这种选择是基于竞争当局的弱点；这不是一种意识形态姿态。

Because of the competitive position of the two authorities, each of which was weak, rulers would sometimes even solicit volunteers among their subjects to settle in march regions in order to increase the reach of their authority. Almost as a matter of course, the subjects were lured into settling in the march by freedom from taxes. Given the delicate margins upon which they competed, if either authority in a march attempted to impose taxes, he would make it more difficult for his followers to make ends meet, as well as give everyone a reason to affiliate with his competitor. Therefore, residents of a march usually had a choice in deciding whose laws they were to obey. This choice was based upon the weakness of the competing authorities; it was not an ideological gesture.

尽管如此，还是出现了一些必须解决的实际困难。在封建制度下，在名义边界两侧拥有财产的地主面临着严重的责任冲突。例如，苏格兰和英格兰边境的领主在两个王国都拥有财产，理论上在发生战争时，他有义务为两国服兵役。为了解决这一矛盾的义务，封建等级制度中几乎每个人都可以通过一种名为“宣誓”的法律程序来选择遵守谁的法律。

Nonetheless, practical difficulties arose that had to be resolved. Under feudalism, landlords who owned property on both sides of a nominal frontier faced a serious conflict of duties. For example, a lord on the frontier of Scotland and England who held properties in both kingdoms could theoretically owe military service to both in the event of war. To resolve this contradictory obligation, almost everyone up and down the feudal hierarchy could choose whose laws to obey through a legal process called avowal.

信息技术将在经济活动本地化过程中创造同等的竞争性选择机会，但也存在重大差异。其中之一是，与中世纪边疆社会不同，网络空间很可能最终成为最富有的经济领域。因此，它将趋向于不断增长的边疆，而不是不断后退的边疆。中世纪社会核心地区的人很少愿意在没有强烈诱因（通常包括宗教命令）的情况下搬到边疆，因为这些地区往往暴力频发、贫困不堪。因此，它们不会像磁铁一样吸引当局无法控制的资源。网络空间将会。

Information technology will create equivalent opportunities for competitive choice in domiciling economic activities, but with important differences. One is that unlike the medieval frontier societies, cyberspace is likely to be in due course the richest of economic realms. It will therefore tend to be a growing rather than a receding frontier. Few persons at the core regions of medieval society would have wished to move to frontiers without strong inducements, often including religious imperatives, because these regions tended to be violent and poor. Therefore, they did not act as magnets drawing resources out of the control of the authorities. Cyberspace will.

其次，新的边界不会是双头垄断，这会导致两个当局勾结，就边界主张做出妥协。这种妥协在中世纪往往行不通，原因有二：敌对当局之间经常存在巨大的文化差异；更重要的是，他们缺乏实施谈判解决方案的物质能力，在实地军事力量不足。在民族国家时代，当国家当局确实开始行使足够的军事力量来实施解决方案时，大多数边境地区和模糊的边界都消失了。边界固定成为常态。如果暴力双头垄断者面临分裂其权力的前景，那么这是一个稳定的解决方案相邻地区的权力机构。但网络经济中交易所在地的竞争将不是两个机构之间的竞争，而是全球数百个机构之间的竞争。领土国家要建立一个有效的卡特尔来保持高税率几乎是不可能的。这与在有数百个竞争对手的市场上合谋享受垄断价格是行不通的。

Secondly, the new frontier will not be a duopoly, which invites collusion between the two authorities to compromise over their frontier claims. Such compromises tended not to be effective during the medieval period for two reasons: there were frequently sharp cultural gaps between the rival authorities; and more important, they lacked the physical capacity to impose a negotiated settlement, having insufficient military power on the ground. During the era of the nation-state, when national authorities did come to exercise sufficient military power to impose solutions, most march regions and vague frontiers disappeared. Border fixing became the norm. That is a stable solution if duopolists of violence face the prospect of dividing their authority over contiguous regions. But the competition in domiciling transactions in the cybereconomy will not be between two authorities, but between hundreds of authorities throughout the globe. For the territorial states to create an effective cartel to keep tax rates high will be all but impossible. This will be true for the same reason that collusion to enjoy monopoly prices in markets with hundreds of competitors does not work.

证据是，印度洋上的一个小国塞舌尔颁布了一项新的投资法，美国政府官员称之为“欢迎罪犯”法案。根据该法律，任何在塞舌尔投资 1000 万美元的人不仅将获得引渡保护，还将获得外交护照。然而，与美国政府的说法相反，预期的受益者不是毒贩，因为他们通常受到更重要的政府的保护，而是政治上不正确的独立企业家。塞舌尔法律的第一个潜在受益者是一位南非白人，他通过规避针对前种族隔离政权的经济制裁而致富。现在他面临着南非新政府经济报复的危险，并愿意向塞舌尔支付保护费^。52

For evidence, consider the move by the Seychelles, a tiny country in the Indian Ocean, to enact a new investment law that U.S. government officials describe as a “Welcome Criminals” act. Under the law, anyone who invests $10 million in the Seychelles will not only be guaranteed protection against extradition, but will be issued a diplomatic passport. Contrary to the assertions of the U.S. government, however, the intended beneficiaries are not drug dealers, who are generally under the protection of more important governments in any event, but independent entrepreneurs who have become politically incorrect. The first potential beneficiary of the Seychelles law is a white South African who became wealthy by circumventing the economic sanctions against the former apartheid regime. Now he faces the danger of economic retribution by the new South African government and is willing to pay the Seychelles for protection.⁵²

不管个别案例的优劣如何，这个例子表明，政府维持卡特尔以保护其领土的企图注定会失败。与中世纪边境不同，当时的竞争只发生在两个当局之间，而网络商务的边境将发生在数百个管辖区之间，而且这个数字可能会迅速增加到数千个。

Whatever the merits of any individual case, the example shows why attempts by governments to maintain a cartel for protection on the ground are doomed to failure. Unlike the medieval frontier, in which the competition was between two authorities only, the frontier in cybercommerce will be between hundreds of jurisdictions, with the number probably rising rapidly to thousands.

在虚拟公司时代，个人将选择在提供最佳服务且成本最低的司法管辖区开展创收活动。换言之，主权将被商业化。与大多数情况下贫穷且暴力的中世纪边疆社会不同，网络空间既不贫穷也不暴力。信息技术促使政府参与的竞争不是军事竞争，而是经济服务质量和价格的竞争——真正的保护。简而言之，政府将有义务满足客户的需求。

In the age of the virtual corporation, individuals will choose to domicile their income-earning activities in a jurisdiction that provides the best service at the lowest cost. In other words, sovereignty will be commercialized. Unlike medieval frontier societies, which were in most cases impoverished and violent, cyberspace will be neither. The competition that information technology is driving governments to engage in is not competition of a military kind, but competition in quality and price of an economic service —genuine protection. In short, governments will be obliged to give customers what they want.

暴力效用的减弱

The Diminished Utility of Violence

当然，这并不是说政府将放弃使用暴力。远非如此。相反，我们要说的是，暴力正在失去其影响力。政府可能采取的一种反应是加大在当地使用暴力的力度，以弥补其在全球影响力的下降。无论政府做什么，然而，他们无法像在当今世界用暴力占领他们所垄断的领域那样，在网络空间中肆意使用暴力。无论有多少政府试图进入网络空间，他们在该领域的能力和力量都不会比其他人强。

This is not to say, of course, that governments will resign from employing violence. Far from it. Rather, what we are saying is that violence is losing a good deal of its leverage. One possible reaction on the part of governments would be to intensify their use of violence in local settings in an attempt to compensate for its declining global significance. Whatever governments do, however, they will be unable to saturate cyberspace with violence in the way that they saturated the territories they monopolized with violence in the modern world. No matter how many governments try to enter cyberspace, they will be no more capable or powerful in that realm than anyone else.

讽刺的是，民族国家试图发动“信息战”来控制或阻止人们进入网络空间，这可能只会加速它们自身的灭亡。由于规模经济的衰退和维系四分五裂的社会群体的成本上升，大型系统权力下放的趋势已经非常强烈。信息战的讽刺之处在于，它们对工业时代遗留下来的脆弱系统造成的冲击可能比对新兴信息经济本身造成的冲击更大。

Ironically, attempts by nation-states to wage “information wars” to dominate or thwart access to cyberspace would probably only accelerate their own demise. The tendency toward the devolution of large systems is already powerful because of the fallaway of scale economies and the rising costs of holding fragmenting social groups together. The irony of information wars is that they could well impose more of a shock to the brittle systems left over from the Industrial Age than to the emerging information economy itself.

只要基本信息技术继续发挥作用，网络商务就能与信息战并驾齐驱，而这种情况在领土战争中是绝对不会发生的。你无法想象在二十世纪的一场战争中，前线会发生数百万笔商业交易。但虚拟战争可能不会耗尽网络空间承载多种活动的能力。而且由于虚拟现实并不存在，因此几乎没有近距离接触的危险，也几乎不会有被虚拟弹片击中的风险。

As long as essential information technology continues to function, cybercommerce could proceed in tandem with the struggles of information war in a way that could never happen in a territorial war. You could not imagine millions of commercial transactions taking place at the front in one of the twentieth century’s wars. But virtual wars may not exhaust any capacity of cyberspace to host multiple activities. And because virtual reality does not exist, there will be little danger of proximity, and almost none of being hit by exploding virtual shrapnel.

大型系统的脆弱性

Vulnerability of Large-Scale Systems

信息战的危险主要在于对由中央指挥和控制运行的大型工业系统的威胁。美国和其他主要民族国家的军事当局都在计划并担心信息破坏行为，因为这种行为可能会对大型系统造成严重后果。网络战行为可能会关闭电话交换站、扰乱空中交通管制或破坏调节城市供水的泵送系统。编程病毒甚至可以关闭传统或核发电机，切断电网的部分区域。所谓的逻辑炸弹可能会扰乱大量信息，其中最敏感的是中央控制系统中的信息，这些系统运行着工业时代遗留下来的脆弱的大型系统。除非大规模全面摧毁所有信息技术，否则网络商务和虚拟现实将超出任何政府的遏制能力，更不用说垄断了。

The dangers of information war will mostly be dangers to large-scale industrial systems that operate with central command and control. Military authorities in the United States and other leading nation-states are both planning for and fearing acts of information sabotage that could have severe consequences for disabling large systems. An act of cyberwarfare could close down a telephone switching station, disrupt air traffic control, or sabotage a pumping system that regulates the flow of water to a city. A programmed virus could even close down conventional or nuclear generators, turning off segments of the electric grid. So-called logic bombs could scramble a great deal of information, the most sensitive of which is in central control systems operating vulnerable, large-scale systems inherited from the Industrial Age. Short of a massive and comprehensive destruction of all information technology, which would bring the world economy literally to a halt, cybercommerce and virtual reality will remain beyond the capacity of any government to stifle, much less monopolize.

信息技术的一个显著缺点，即信息存储系统容易腐烂和破坏，也已通过新的存档技术得到很大程度的解决。一种名为“高密度只读存储器”或“HD-ROM”的新系统采用了离子硬盘驱动器使用类似于计算机辅助制造系统中在真空中创建档案的机器。现在的存储容量高达每平方英寸 25,000 兆字节。早期的系统易受冲击而早期衰减和破坏，而 HD-ROM 中存储的数据则可以长期保存。HD-ROM 的开发人员之一布鲁斯·拉马丁说：“它几乎不受时间、热和机械冲击以及对其他存储介质具有极大破坏性的电磁场的侵蚀。” ⁵³即使是核恐怖分子引爆的炸弹，也未必会扰乱或摧毁重要信息，例如数字货币的代码，而网络经济的顺利运行取决于这些信息。

Even one of the signal drawbacks of information technology, the apparent vulnerability of information-storage systems to decay and destruction, has been largely resolved by new archival technology. A new system called “High-Density Read-Only Memory,” or “HD-ROM,” employs an ion mill similar to those used in computer-aided manufacturing systems to create archives in a vacuum. Storage capacity is now as high as 25,000 megabytes per square inch. Unlike earlier systems that were vulnerable to early decay and disruption by shock, data stored in HD-ROM promises to be around for the duration. One of HD-ROM’s developers, Bruce Lamartine, says, “It’s virtually impervious to the ravages of time, thermal and mechanical shock, or the electromagnetic fields that are so destructive to other storage mediums.”⁵³ Even the detonation of a blast by nuclear terrorists would not necessarily scramble or destroy vital information, such as the codes to digital money, upon which the smooth functioning of a cybereconomy will depend.

“现代军队如此依赖信息，以至于有可能使他们失明或失聪，从而在不进行传统意义上的战斗的情况下取得胜利。” ⁵⁴

—美国空军上校A LAN C AMPEN（退役）

“Modern armies are so dependent on information that it is possible to blind and deafen them in order to achieve victory without fighting in the conventional sense.”⁵⁴

—COL. ALAN CAMPEN, U.S.A.F. (Ret.)

虚拟战争的超级大国​​

SUPERPOWERS OF VIRTUAL WARFARE

随着信息在战争中的重要性日益增加，民族国家参战的假设在超级政治中将越来越不合理。由于网络空间并不具备物理存在，因此我们在物理世界中所知的量级并不具有任何主导性的重要性。有多少程序员参与制定一系列命令并不重要。重要的是程序是否能运行。在网络空间中，主权个体可能真的与民族国家一样重要，后者在联合国拥有席位，拥有自己的国旗，并在地面部署了军队。从纯粹的经济角度来看，一些主权个体每年已经拥有数亿美元的可投资收入，这些收入超过了一些破产民族国家的可自由支配的支出能力。但这还不是全部。就通过操纵信息发动的虚拟战争而言，一些个体可能与世界上许多国家一样大，甚至更大。理论上，一个奇特的天才，通过与数字仆人合作，可以在网络战争中取得与民族国家同等的影响力。比尔·盖茨当然可以。

The assumptions of the nation-state at war will make less and less megapolitical sense as the importance of information in warfare increases. Because it has no physical existence, cyberspace is not a realm in which magnitudes as we know them in the physical world carry any commanding importance. It does not matter how many programmers were involved in stipulating a sequence of commands. All that matters is whether the program functions. The Sovereign Individual may truly count for as much in cyberspace as does a nation-state, with its seat in the UN, its own flag, and an army deployed on the ground. In purely economic terms, some Sovereign Individuals already command investible incomes in the hundreds of millions annually, sums that exceed the discretionary spending power of some of the bankrupt nation-states. But that is not all. In terms of virtual warfare waged through the manipulation of information, some individuals may loom as large or larger than many of the world’s states. One bizarre genius, working with digital servants, could theoretically achieve the same impact in a cyberwar as a nation-state. Bill Gates certainly could.

从这个意义上说，主权个体时代不仅仅是一句口号。一个黑客，或者一小群数学家，更不用说像微软这样的公司，或者几乎任何一家计算机软件公司，原则上都可以做五角大楼网络战特遣部队所拥有的任何或所有事情。硅谷和其他地方有数百家公司这些国家发动网络战的能力，已经比现存90%的国家更强。

In this sense, the age of the Sovereign Individual is not merely a slogan. A hacker, or a small group of mathematicians, not to mention a company like Microsoft, or almost any computer software company, could in principle do any or all of the things that the Pentagon’s Cyber War Task Force has up its sleeves. There are hundreds of firms in the Silicon Valley and elsewhere that already have a greater capacity to wage a cyberwar than 90 percent of the existing nation-states.

1998 年的事件让美国总统及其高级助手作证说，美国的主要敌人不是另一个民族国家，而是流亡沙特的百万富翁奥萨马·本·拉登。本·拉登个人对工业时代最大的军事强国构成了重大威胁，这一说法得到了巡航导弹的弹道支持。我们并不完全相信本·拉登不是被挑选出来扮演“内罗毕爆炸案的理查德·朱厄尔”的角色。但无论如何，如果像本·拉登这样的个人可以令人信服地成为对美国的严重威胁的恐怖分子，那么他或其他千万富翁就更可能令人信服地成为网络恐怖分子，因为网络技术使个人在面对大型团体时所处的劣势比在面对爆炸物和导弹时要小。

Events of 1998 brought testimony from the U.S. President and his top aides that the leading enemy of the United States was not another nation-state, but Osama bin Laden, an exiled Saudi millionaire. The claim that Bin Laden, an individual, was a significant threat to the greatest military power of the Industrial Age was backed up by a barrage of cruise missiles. We are not altogether convinced that Bin Laden was not merely picked out to play the part of the “Richard Jewell of the Nairobi bombing.” But be that as it may, if an individual like Bin Laden could be convincing as a dire threat to the United States as a terrorist, he or another multimillionaire could be even more convincing as a cyberterrorist, for cybertechnology puts individuals at a lesser disadvantage in confronting large groups than they face in the realm of explosives and missiles.

认为政府将继续垄断地面生活，因为各方都有替代的保护途径，这种假设是过时的。更可能的结果是，民族国家必须重新配置，以减少它们对计算机病毒、逻辑炸弹、受感染的线路和陷阱门程序的脆弱性，这些都可能被美国国家安全局或一些青少年黑客监控。

The presumption that governments will continue to monopolize life on the ground as alternative avenues for protection open on all sides is an anachronism. A far more likely outcome is that nation-states will have to be reconfigured to reduce their vulnerability to computer viruses, logic bombs, infected wires, and trapdoor programs that could be monitored by the U.S. National Security Agency, or some teenage hacker.

网络空间的超级政治逻辑表明，目前主导世界大规模基础设施的中央指挥和控制系统必须被具有分布式能力的多中心安全模型所取代，这样它们就不容易被计算机病毒捕获或阻止。新型软件，即所谓的 agoric 开放系统，将取代从工业时代继承下来的指挥和控制软件。旧软件根据严格的优先级分配计算能力，这与前苏联国家计划委员会的中央计划人员过去按照严格的规则将货物分配到货车的方式非常相似。新系统由模拟市场机制的算法控制，通过模仿大脑竞争过程的内部竞标过程更有效地分配资源。在新千年，大型计算机垄断企业将不再执行重要的指挥和控制功能，而是分散化。

The megapolitical logic of cyberspace suggests that central command-and-control systems that currently dominate the world’s large-scale infrastructure will have to be replaced by multicentric models of security with distributed capabilities so they cannot be easily captured or blocked by a computer virus. New types of software, known as agoric open systems, will replace command-and-control software inherited from the Industrial Age. That older software allocated computational capacity according to rigid priorities in much the same way that the central planners at Gosplan in the former Soviet Union used to allocate goods to boxcars by rigid rules. The new systems are controlled by algorithms that mock market mechanisms to allocate resources more efficiently by an internal bidding process that mimics the competitive processes in the brain. Instead of giant computer monopolies conducting important command-and-control functions, they will be decentralized in the new millennium.

与指挥控制系统相比，分布式网络的弹性没有比 Digital Equipment 在其帕洛阿尔托研究实验室提供的例子更好的例子了。一位工程师打开了该公司自己的计算机网络的柜门。正如凯文·凯利 (Kevin Kelly) 所叙述的那样，这位工程师戏剧性地“从内部拔出了一根电缆。网络绕过了漏洞，一点也没有动摇。” ⁵⁵

There is no better example of the resilience of distributed networks compared to command-and-control systems than that given by Digital Equipment at its Palo Alto research lab. An engineer opened the door to a closet that housed the company’s own computer network. As recounted by Kevin Kelly, the engineer dramatically “yanked a cable out of its guts. The network routed around the breach and didn’t falter a bit.”⁵⁵

信息时代不仅将促进网络空间无政府状态的竞争，还将不可避免地导致重要系统的重新设计工业化遗留下来的机构。这种重新配置对于使它们更不容易受到来自任何人或任何地方的破坏至关重要。正如工业时代不可避免地导致中世纪遗留下来的机构（如学校和大学）的重新配置一样，工业时代遗留下来的机构也可能以微型形式退化，其方式反映了微技术的逻辑。

The Information Age will not only facilitate competition without anarchy in cyberspace; it will inevitably lead to the redesign of important systems left over from industrialism. Such a reconfiguration is essential to make them less vulnerable to mischief that could come from anyone or anywhere. Just as the Industrial Age inevitably led to the reconfiguration of institutions that were left over from the medieval period, such as schools and universities, so the leftover institutions of the Industrial Age are likely to devolve in miniature form, in ways that reflect the logic of microtechnology.

为防范信息高速公路上的盗贼，必须广泛采用公钥-私钥加密算法。这些算法已允许个人计算机的任何个人用户对任何信息进行加密，其安全性比五角大楼在上一代人之前封存发射密码的安全性还要高。这些强大、牢不可破的加密形式对于确保金融交易免受黑客和窃贼的侵害必不可少。

The need for protection against bandits on the Information Superhighway will require widespread adopting of public key-private key encryption algorithms. These already allow any individual user of a personal computer to encode any message more securely than the Pentagon could have sealed its launch codes only a generation ago. These powerful, unbreakable forms of encryption will be necessary to secure financial transactions from hackers and thieves.

它们之所以必要还有另一个原因。当私人金融机构和中央银行意识到美国政府（可能不止美国政府）有能力渗透当前的银行软件和计算机系统，让一个国家破产或几乎任何地方任何人的银行账户都被洗劫一空时，它们就会采用牢不可破的加密算法。从技术上讲，没有任何理由让任何个人或任何国家将其金融存款或交易交给美国国家安全局或克格勃的继任者或任何类似组织（无论是合法的还是非法的）来处置。

They will also be necessary for another reason. Private financial institutions and central banks will adopt unbreakable encryption algorithms when they realize that the U.S. government—and it may not be alone—has the capacity to penetrate current bank software and computer systems to literally bankrupt a country or sweep the bank account of anyone living almost anywhere. There is no technological reason why any individual or any country should leave his financial deposits or transactions at the mercy of the U.S. National Security Agency or the successors to the KGB, or any similar organization, licit or illicit.

政府无法破解的加密算法并非白日梦。它们已经以共享软件的形式在互联网上可用。当低轨道卫星系统完全投入使用时，使用天线不大于便携式电话天线的先进个人电脑的个人将能够与全球任何地方进行通信，甚至无需接入电话系统。政府将不可能垄断网络空间这个根本不存在的领域，就像中世纪骑士不可能骑着沉重的战马控制工业时代的交易一样。

Encryption algorithms impenetrable by governments are not daydreams. They are available already as shareware over the Internet. When low-orbit satellite systems are fully operable, individuals using advanced personal computers with antennae no larger than those on portable phones will be able to communicate anywhere on the globe without even interfacing with the telephone system. It will no more be possible for a government to monopolize cyberspace, a realm with no physical existence at all, than it would have been for medieval knights to control transactions in the industrial period astride a heavy charger.

隐身保护

Protection by Stealth

信息社会将使大量资源处于掠夺者的范围之外。当网络空间越来越多地成为金融交易和其他商业形式的载体时，在那里使用的资源将或多或少地免受普通敲诈勒索和盗窃的影响。因此，掠夺者将无法像今天和整个二十世纪那样控制如此多的资源。

Information societies will place vast resources outside the realm of predation. When cyberspace comes increasingly to host financial transactions and other forms of commerce, the resources employed there will be more or less immune to ordinary shakedowns and theft. Therefore, predators will be unable to harness as large a share of resources as they do today and have done through much of the twentieth century.

因此，政府对世界财富的很大一部分的保护将不可避免地变得多余。政府将不会更好地保护网络空间中的银行存款比你多。由于政府将不再那么必要，其相对价格很可能会因为这个原因而下降。还有其他原因。

Inevitably, therefore, government protection of a large part of the world’s wealth will be redundant. Government will be no better situated to protect a bank balance in cyberspace than you are. As government will be less necessary, its relative price is likely to fall for that reason alone. There are others.

在新千年，随着越来越多的金融交易在网络空间进行，个人将可以选择在哪个司法管辖区进行交易。这将在非垄断的基础上产生激烈的竞争，为政府服务（政府征收的税款）定价。这是革命性的。正如乔治·梅洛安在《华尔街日报》上所说，最成功地抵制全球竞争力量的机构是福利国家。“沃顿商学院和澳大利亚国立大学的研究人员进行的一项研究讨论了影响收入转移的力量。杰弗里·加勒特和黛博拉·米切尔得出结论，‘几乎没有证据表明市场一体化程度的提高对其最基本的福利计划产生了下行压力。’相反，他们写道，‘政府总是通过增加收入转移来应对国际市场的一体化程度的提高。’” ⁵⁶网络经济的出现最终将使福利国家面临真正的竞争。它将改变主权的性质并改造经济体，因为保护和勒索之间的平衡比以往任何时候都更加彻底地倾向于保护一边。

With a large and growing share of financial transactions occurring in cyberspace in the new millennium, individuals will have a choice of jurisdictions in which to lodge them. This will create intense competition to price government’s services (the taxes it charges) on a nonmonopolistic basis. This is revolutionary. As George Melloan argued in The Wall Street Journal, the one institution that has most successfully resisted the forces of global competition has been the welfare state. “A study by researchers at the Wharton School and the Australian National University discussed the forces coming to bear on income transfers. Geoffrey Garrett and Deborah Mitchell concluded that ‘there is virtually no evidence that increased market integration has put downward pressures on their most fundamental welfare programs.’ To the contrary, they write, ‘governments have invariably responded to increased integration into international markets by increasing income transfers.’ ”⁵⁶ The advent of the cybereconomy will at long last finally expose the welfare state to genuine competition. It will change the nature of sovereignties and transform economies, as the balance between protection and extortion swings more completely on the side of protection than it has ever done before.

请参阅《大清算》第 8 章“非线性世界中的线性期望：望远镜如何引导我们进行计算；计算机如何帮助我们观察”。

I. See Chapter 8 of The Great Reckoning, “Linear Expectations in a Nonlinear World: How the Telescope Led Us to Compute; How the Computer Can Help Us to See.”

II . 请注意，莱恩所提出的使用暴力的竞争与垄断的四个阶段，不同于我们所确定的经济生活组织的四个阶段——即采集、农耕、工业化和信息时代。

II. Note that Lane’s four stages of competition and monopoly in the use of violence are different from the four stages in the organization of economic life that we identify—namely, foraging, farming, industrialism, and the Information Age.

第七章超越地域 网络经济的出现

CHAPTER 7 TRANSCENDING LOCALITY The Emergence of the Cybereconomy

“真正的问题在于控制。互联网太普及了，很难被任何一个政府控制。通过创建一个无缝衔接的全球经济区，反主权、不受监管，互联网使民族国家的概念本身受到质疑。” ¹

—约翰·珀鲁·巴洛

“The real issue is control. The Internet is too widespread to be easily dominated by any single government. By creating a seamless global-economic zone, anti-sovereign and unregulatable, the Internet calls into question the very idea of a nation-state.”¹

—JOHN PERW BARLOW

信息高速公路已成为数字时代初期最熟悉的隐喻之一。它之所以引人注目，不仅因为它的普及性，还因为它暴露了人们对网络经济的普遍误解。毕竟，高速公路是人行道的工业版本，是人和货物物理运输的网络。信息经济不像高速公路、铁路或管道。它不像横贯加拿大的高速公路将重型卡车从艾伯塔省运送到新不伦瑞克省那样将信息从一个点运送到另一个点。世界所称的“信息高速公路”不仅仅是一个运输环节。它是目的地。

The Information Superhighway has become one of the more familiar metaphors of the early days of the digital age. It is remarkable not only for its pervasiveness, but also for the common misunderstanding it betrays about the cybereconomy. A highway, after all, is an industrial version of a footpath, a network for the physical transit of people and goods. The information economy is not like a highway, a railroad, or a pipeline. It does not haul or transport information from point to point the way the Trans-Canada Highway carries heavy trucks from Alberta to New Brunswick. What the world calls the “Information Superhighway” is not merely a transit link. It is the destination.

网络空间超越了地域性。它涉及随时随地的即时数据共享。新兴信息经济的基础是连接和重新连接数百万人的互联互通数百万台计算机的用户。其本质在于这些连接所带来的新可能性。正如约翰·佩里·巴洛所说：“网络提供的是一个全球性和反主权的新社会空间的承诺，在这个空间里，任何地方的任何人都可以毫无畏惧地向其他人表达他或她所相信的一切。这些新媒体预示着可能会摧毁地球上所有专制权力的思想和经济自由。” ²

Cyberspace transcends locality. It involves nothing less than the instantaneous sharing of data everywhere and nowhere at once. The emerging information economy is based in the interconnections linking and relinking millions of users of millions of computers. Its essence lies in the new possibilities that arise from these connections. As John Perry Barlow put it, “What the Net offers is the promise of a new social space, global and anti-sovereign, within which anybody, anywhere can express to the rest of humanity whatever he or she believes without fear. There is in these new media a foreshadowing of the intellectual and economic liberty that might undo all the authoritarian powers on earth.”²

网络空间就像荷马神话中诸神的想象世界，与我们所熟悉的农场和工厂的地面世界截然不同。然而，它的影响将不是想象出来的，而是真实的。信息的即时共享将像溶剂一样溶解大型机构，其程度远远超过许多人现在的理解。它不仅会改变暴力的逻辑（正如我们已经探讨过的）；它还将从根本上改变决定企业组织方式和经济运作方式的信息和交易成本。我们预计微处理将改变世界的经济组织。

Cyberspace, like the imaginary realm of Homer’s gods, is a realm apart from the familiar terrestrial world of farm and factory. Yet its consequences will not be imaginary, but real. To a far greater extent than many now understand, the instantaneous sharing of information will be like a solvent dissolving large institutions. It will not only alter the logic of violence, as we have already explored; it will radically alter information and transaction costs that determine how businesses organize and the way the economy functions. We expect microprocessing to change the economic organization of the world.

“今天，一家公司可以在任何地方设立工厂，利用任何地方的资源来生产可以在任何地方销售的产品，这种可能性比世界历史上任何时候都大。”

—米尔顿·弗里德曼

“It is today possible, to a greater extent than at any time in the world’s history, for a company to locate anywhere, to use resources from anywhere to produce a product that can be sold anywhere.”

—MILTON FRIEDMAN

地方暴政​​​​

THE TYRANNY OF PLACE

工业时代即将消亡，人们第一次尝试将信息经济视为一项庞大的公共工程项目，这一事实表明我们的思维模式根植于过去的范式。这就像听到 18 世纪末的农民将工厂描述为“有屋顶的农场”。然而，“高速公路”的比喻比这更能说明问题。它还暴露了我们受制于地点暴政的程度。即使技术使我们能够超越地方性，我们解脱的工具也被赋予了一个绰号，描述为从一个地方到另一个地方的路线。就像以归巢本能为特征的鲑鱼一样，我们的意识仍然深深地被地方性的概念所铭刻。

The fact that the fading industrial era’s first stab at conceiving the information economy is to think of it in terms of a gigantic public works project tells you how grounded our thinking is in the paradigms of the past. It is rather like hearing farmers at the end of the eighteenth century describe a factory as “a farm with a roof.” Yet the “superhighway” metaphor is more revealing than that. It also betrays the extent to which we are hostage to the tyranny of place. Even when technology enables us to transcend locality, the instrument of our deliverance is given a nickname describing it as a route from place to place. Like salmon marked by their homing instinct, our consciousness is still deeply etched by notions of locality.

迄今为止，整个历史时期，经济都与一个地方地理区域紧密相连。20 世纪之前，大多数人的生活就像被软禁的囚犯一样，很少走出出生地，走上几天路程以外的路程。任何距离的旅程都是几代人的努力。只有偶尔有人危机——战争、瘟疫、气候的不利变化——刺激了大规模的移民。要把人们从悲惨的村庄里赶出来，需要一些引人注目的、紧迫的事情。没有什么比这更能刺激人们收拾行囊，四处游荡，寻找更好的生活。

For the whole of history until now, economies have been tethered to a local geographic area. Most people who lived before the twentieth century passed their days like de facto prisoners under house arrest, seldom venturing more than a few days’ walk from where they were born. A journey of any distance was the work of generations. Only occasionally did some crisis—war, pestilence, an adverse shift in climate—stimulate a broad migration. To move human beings out of a wretched village required something spectacular and pressing. Nothing less could stimulate people to bundle up their belongings and wander off in search of a better life.

直到最近，那些在自己的地方之外寻找机会的少数人往往能成名。想想马可波罗，他曾横跨欧亚大陆，拜访大汗的宫廷，至今仍为人所知。他是那个时代的例外。前现代时期的游记存世不多。在最广为阅读的游记中，以法语写于 1357 年的曼德维尔游记最为著名，因为作者可能从未离开过欧洲。曼德维尔传达了世界各地生活的有趣且常常充满幻想的细节，包括许多埃塞俄比亚人只有一只脚的说法：“他们的脚很大，当他们躺下休息时，可以遮住整个身体以抵挡阳光。” ³显然，读过曼德维尔这个通俗故事的同代人中很少有人知道他的埃塞俄比亚“大脚怪”并不存在。

Until recently, the few who looked outside their own locale for opportunity often became famous. Consider that Marco Polo is still renowned for having traipsed the Eurasian continent to visit the court of the Great Khan. He was the exception in his time. Few other travelogues survive from the premodern period. Among the more widely read, Mandeville’s Travels, written in French in 1357, is notable for having been composed by someone who probably never left Europe. Mandeville conveys delightful and often fanciful details about life around the globe, including the suggestion that many Ethiopians have only one foot: “[T]he foot is so large that it shadoweth all the body against the sun when they will lie and rest them.”³ Clearly, few of Mandeville’s contemporaries who read his popular story were likely to have known that his Ethiopian “Bigfoot” did not exist.

直到 15 世纪末期，随着探险之旅的开启，现代时代才开始，各大洲之间才有了持续的联系。克里斯托弗·哥伦布和瓦斯科·达·伽马等勇敢的船长出发抢占香料贸易，他们的非凡成就足以在五个世纪的大部分时间里被每个有文化的家庭铭记。

Not until the modern age began with the journeys of exploration at the very end of the fifteenth century were there sustained contacts between the continents. Intrepid captains like Christopher Columbus and Vasco da Gama who set out to capture the spice trade were extraordinary enough to be remembered in every literate household for the better part of five centuries.

从农耕时代开始直到最近几代人，生活一直以静止为特征。今天，这一点几乎已被遗忘，尤其是在“新世界”的欧洲殖民殖民地，那里的流动更加流动，每个人都倾向于从移民的角度来看待问题。北美基础教育的一个主题是，殖民者来自欧洲，寻求自由和机会，这是事实。然而，很少有人说的是，大多数人是多么不愿意踏上旅程，即使在国内面临贫困。少数移民经历了今天难以想象的磨难，才得以立足。只有最有进取心或最绝望的穷人才会来。在十七世纪中叶，被关押在伦敦臭名昭著的教养所布莱德韦尔的囚犯起义，以表示“他们不愿去弗吉尼亚”。⁴ 1720年，巴黎街头爆发骚乱，以释放即将被驱逐到路易斯安那的流浪汉、小偷和杀人犯。

From the advent of farming until recent generations, life was characterized by its immobility. This is all but forgotten today, particularly in the European settlement colonies of the “New World,” where movement is more fluid and everyone tends to draw his perspective from the vantage point of an immigrant. A theme of elementary education in North America is that the colonists came from Europe seeking freedom and opportunity, which is true. What is seldom told, however, is how reluctant most people were to take the trip, even when faced with destitution at home. The few who did migrate suffered what are in today’s terms unimaginable ordeals to establish themselves. Only the most enterprising or the most desperate of the poor came. In the middle of the seventeenth century, inmates locked up in Bridewell, London’s notorious house of correction, revolted to show “their unwillingness to go to Virginia.”⁴ In 1720, there were riots in the streets of Paris to free vagabonds, thieves, and murderers scheduled for deportation to Louisiana.

视野狭窄

Narrow Horizons

沟通和交通方面的物质障碍，加上大多数时候和地方的语言能力有限，使人类行为的焦点变得狭窄和本地化。直到 20 世纪初，发现中国村庄相距仅五英里，甚至沿海地区也讲着互不相通的方言。几乎所有经济体的地方组织都造成了市场狭窄和机会丧失的惩罚。由于竞争有限，要素成本居高不下。获得专业技能的机会微乎其微。由于收入低得勉强过上赤贫的生活，而且无法获得外部资本或有效的保险市场，世界上许多小农户陷入了贫困。我们探讨了封闭的乡村生活给农民带来的一些困难。即使在我们撰写本文时，至少有十亿人，其中大部分在亚洲和非洲，每天靠不到一美元的生活挣扎求生。

Physical difficulties of communication and transport, compounded at most times and places by limited language skills, kept the focus of human action narrow and local. As recently as the early twentieth century, it was common to find Chinese villages lying only five miles apart speaking mutually unintelligible dialects, even along the coast. The local organization of almost all economies imposed a penalty of narrow markets and lost opportunity. Factor costs were kept high due to limited competition. Access to specialized skills was minimal. With incomes so low they scraped the margins of destitution, and no access to outside capital or efficient insurance markets, small farmers in much of the world were trapped in poverty. We have explored some of the difficulties imposed upon peasants by the confines of closed village life. Even now, as we write, at least a billion people, mostly in Asia and Africa, struggle to survive on less than a dollar a day.

“一切政治都是地方性的”​

“ALL POLITICS IS LOCAL”

人类及其资产的不可流动性在很大程度上影响了我们看待世界的方式，而人们对此的认识却远超人们的普遍认识。即便是那些似乎最愿意承认地球在二十世纪末是一个很小的地方的人，仍然在用过时的工业政治观念来思考问题。20 世纪 80 年代，环保主义者中流行的一句口号就强调了这一点：“放眼全球，立足本地。”这是一条反映政治逻辑的命令，而这种逻辑总是依靠地方权力优势。

To a greater extent than is commonly realized, the immobility of people and their assets has informed the way we see the world. Even those who seem most ready to agree that the earth is a small place as the twentieth century ends continue to think in terms constrained by antiquated concepts of industrial politics. This is underscored by a slogan that became popular among environmentalists in the 1980s: “Think globally but act locally.” It is an injunction that mirrors the logic of politics, a logic that has always turned on local power advantages.

地方思维习惯是由过去所有社会的超级政治决定的。所有阻碍或促进权力行使的地形特征都是地方性的。每条河流、每座山脉、每个岛屿都是地方性的。气候也是地方性的。随着你爬上爬下一座山，温度、降雨量和生长条件都会发生变化。每一种微生物都在某个地方流通，而不是在其他地方流通。

The local habit of mind has been dictated by the megapolitics of all past societies. All topographical features that serve as barriers or facilitators to the exercise of power are local. Every river, every mountain, every island is local. Climate is local. Temperature, rainfall, and growing conditions vary as you climb up and over a mountain. Every microbe that circulates, circulates somewhere, and not in some other place.

难怪地方暴政渗透到了我们对社会组织和运作方式的观念中。权力优势让一个或另一个群体在当地垄断了暴力，而这种优势迄今为止总是起源于某个地方，并沿着划定边界的超级政治边缘逐渐消退。这就是为什么从来没有一个世界政府。

Little wonder that the tyranny of place permeates our concepts of how society must organize and function. The power advantages that have given one group or another a local monopoly on violence have heretofore always originated someplace and faded along the megapolitical margins where borders are drawn. That is why there has never been a world government.

虽然很少明确指出地点对权力行使的重要性，但早在 20 世纪 30 年代，一些主张强制重新分配人类行为报酬的人就开始感觉到地点的影响力正在下降。他们在现代交通中看到了高薪阶层和穷人之间的社会空间划分。约翰·多斯·帕索斯 (John Dos Passos) 在《大钱》(The Big Money) 中描述了这种担忧： “‘女人’坐在高速公路边上，身体虚弱，饥肠辘辘。头顶上飞过一架载满高薪高管的横跨大陆的飞机。上层阶级飞向空中，下层阶级走上公路：他们之间不再有任何联系，他们是两个国家。” ⁵这换句话说，交通的改善仅仅通过增加成功人士可能选择的地方就降低了敲诈勒索的杠杆作用。当然，下面的路上的流浪汉没有资格向头顶上的人索要施舍。多斯帕索斯六十年前观察到的趋势只会变得更加明显。

While the importance of place to the exercise of power has rarely been made explicit, some advocates of compulsion to redistribute the rewards of human action began to sense the declining leverage of place as long ago as the 1930s. They saw in modern transportation a division of social space between the highly paid and the poor. This fear was captured by John Dos Passos in The Big Money: “The ‘vag’ sits on the edge of the highway, broken, hungry. Overhead, flies a transcontinental plane filled with highly paid executives. The upper class has taken to the air, the lower class to the road: there is no longer any bond between them, they are two nations.”⁵ This is another way of saying that improved transportation reduced the leverage of extortion simply by increasing the choice of places where successful persons might choose to be. Certainly, the vagabond on the road below was in no position to press for a handout from those flying overhead. The tendencies that Dos Passos observed sixty years ago have only become more pronounced.

公共交通

Mass Transit

1995 年，每天有 100 万人跨越世界某个地方的边界。这与过去相比发生了惊人的变化。在 20 世纪之前，旅行非常罕见，大多数边界只是边界，而不是过境的障碍。护照还不为人所知。远洋班轮、火车和其他改进的交通方式的发展大大增加了流动。但是，这种流动受到国家的更严格管制，因为交通和通讯的改进使平民旅行更便宜、更方便，而国家的权力也随之增强。电影，尤其是电视的出现也极大地开阔了视野，刺激了旅行和移民。然而，到目前为止，社会和经济组织的基本假设仍然扎根于地方性。

In 1995, a million persons crossed borders somewhere in the world each day. This represents a startling change from the past. Before the twentieth century, travel was so infrequent that most borders were simply frontiers, not barriers to transit. Passports were unknown. The development of ocean liners, trains, and other improved forms of transportation dramatically increased movement. But this movement became more heavily regulated by states whose powers were increased by the same improvements in transportation and communications that made civilian travel cheaper and easier. The advent of movies and, especially, television also did a great deal to open horizons and stimulate travel and immigration. Yet until now, the bedrock assumptions of social and economic organization have remained anchored in locality.

“……为了避免历史会因为勇气的缺失而给予如此无情的惩罚——我们必须有勇气将所有技术推断推向其合乎逻辑的结论。” ⁶

—亚瑟·C·克拉克

“…to avoid that Failure of Nerve for which history exacts so merciless a penalty—we must have the courage to follow all technical extrapolations to their logical conclusion.”⁶

—ARTHUR C. CLARKE

最低期望错误​​​​​

THE ERROR OF MINIMAL EXPECTATIONS

地理因素对想象力的束缚仍然十分紧密，以至于 1995 年一些研究互联网的专家得出结论，互联网几乎没有商业潜力，除了作为聊天的电子媒介和色情的出口之外，几乎没有任何意义。许多对网络空间经济重要性持怀疑态度的人是信息时代的 Blimps 上校。他们的自满情绪堪比 20 世纪 30 年代英国当权者面对帝国衰落时的自满情绪。每当精英们发现自己受到威胁时，他们的第一反应就是否认。这表现在人们热切地希望互联网永远不会有太大成就，有时这种希望得到了本该更了解情况的当局的支持。我们之前提到过 David Kline 和 Daniel Burstein 的作品《公路勇士：信息高速公路上的梦想与噩梦》。他们驳斥了互联网对经济重要性的怀疑。网络的经济潜力再次证明，精通技术并不等同于理解技术的后果，⁷

The geographic tether on imagination is still so tight that some experts examining the Internet in 1995 concluded that it has little commercial potential and almost no significance other than as an electronic medium for chat and an outlet for pornography. The many doubters of the economic importance of cyberspace are the Colonel Blimps of the Information Age. Their complacency rivals that of the British establishment facing the decline of the empire in the 1930s. Whenever elites find themselves threatened, their first reaction is denial. This is evidenced by the fond hope that the Internet will never amount to much, sometimes endorsed by authorities who should know better. We referred earlier to David Kline and Daniel Burstein’s work, Road Warriors: Dreams and Nightmares Along the Information Highway. Their dismissal of the economic potential of the Net is another proof that being technically well-informed is not synonymous with understanding the consequences of technology,⁷

即使是过去最精通技术的观察家也常常无法理解新技术的含义。1878 年，英国议会委员会召开会议，讨论托马斯·爱迪生白炽灯的前景，报告称爱迪生的想法“对我们的大西洋彼岸的朋友来说已经足够好了……但不值得实践或科学界人士的关注。” ⁸托马斯·爱迪生本人是一位有远见的人，但他认为自己发明的留声机主要供商人用于口述。就在莱特兄弟证明飞机可以飞行之前不久，杰出的美国天文学家西蒙·纽科姆权威地证明了为什么重于空气的飞行是不可能的。他总结道：“在作者看来，任何已知物质、已知机械形式和已知力形式的可能组合都无法结合成一种实用的机器，使人们能够通过它飞行很长的距离，这一论证是任何物理事实所能达到的最完整论证。” ⁹飞机开始飞行后不久，另一位著名天文学家威廉·H·皮克林向公众解释了商业旅行为何无法实现：“人们通常想象巨型飞行器飞越大西洋，载着无数乘客，就像我们现代的蒸汽船一样……很明显，我们目前的设备根本无法与火车头或汽车在速度上相媲美。” 10^我们之前还提到过另一个关于新技术潜力的极其不准确的预言——20 世纪初，梅赛德斯制造商预测全球汽车数量永远不会超过 100 万辆。同样，他们对汽车的了解几乎比任何人都多，但他们对汽车对社会影响的估计却大错特错。

Even the most technically expert observers in the past have frequently failed to grasp the implications of new technologies. A British parliamentary committee, convened in 1878 to consider the prospects for Thomas Edison’s incandescent lamp, reported Edison’s ideas to be “good enough for our transatlantic friends,… but unworthy of the attention of practical or scientific men.”⁸ Thomas Edison himself was a man of great vision, but he thought that the phonograph he invented would be employed mainly by businessmen for dictation. Only a short time before the Wright brothers proved that airplanes would fly, the distinguished American astronomer Simon Newcomb authoritatively demonstrated why heavier-than-air flight was impossible. He concluded: “The demonstration that no possible combination of known substances, known forms of machinery and known forms of force, can be united in a practical machine by which men shall fly long distances through the air, seems to the writer as complete as it is possible for the demonstration of any physical fact to be.”⁹ Soon after airplanes began to fly, another renowned astronomer, William H. Pickering, explained to the public why commercial travel would never get off the ground: “The popular mind often pictures gigantic flying machines speeding across the Atlantic and carrying innumerable passengers in a way analogous to our modern steamships.…[I]t is clear that with our present devices there is no hope of competing for racing speed with either our locomotives or our automobiles.”¹⁰ We have previously recalled another wildly inaccurate prophecy about the potential of a new technology—the forecast from the beginning of the twentieth century by the makers of Mercedes that there would never be more than a million automobiles worldwide. Again, they knew more about automobiles than almost anyone but they could not have been more wrong in estimating the impact of autos on society.

鉴于这种毫无头绪的误解传统，许多观察家迟迟未能领会新信息技术最重要的含义——它超越了地域的专制，这一点并不令人意外。新技术首次为经济活动创造了一个无限的、非地球的领域。它为探索网络经济的新领域提供了选择，即“全球化思考和全球化行动”。本章将解释其中的原因。

Given this tradition of clueless misunderstandings, it is hardly surprising that many observers are slow to grasp the most important implications of the new information technology—the fact that it transcends the tyranny of place. The new technology creates for the first time an infinite, nonterrestrial realm for economic activity. It opens an option to explore the new frontiers of the cybereconomy, to “think globally and act globally.” This chapter explains why.

超越本地​​

BEYOND LOCALITY

信息的处理和使用正在迅速取代和改变实体产品，成为最重要的利润来源。这在很大程度上后果。信息技术将收入潜力与居住地分离。由于产品和服务价值中越来越多的部分将通过向产品添加创意和知识来创造，因此越来越小的增值部分将受制于当地管辖范围。创意可以在任何地方形成，并以光速传播到全球。这不可避免地意味着信息经济将与工厂时代的经济截然不同。

The processing and use of information is rapidly replacing and modifying physical products as the most important source of profit. This has major consequences. Information technology divorces income-earning potential from residence in any specific geographic location. Since a greater and greater portion of the value of products and services will be created by adding ideas and knowledge to the product, an ever-smaller component of value-added will be subject to capture within local jurisdictions. Ideas can be formulated anywhere and transmitted globally at the speed of light. This inevitably means that the information economy will be dramatically different from the economy of the Factory Age.

我们承认批评者的观点，重述 1998 年你通过互联网可以完成的任务可能显得平淡无奇。毕竟，在网上阅读一篇关于园艺的文章，或者远程购买一箱葡萄酒，并没有什么革命性。然而，网络经济的潜力不能仅仅根据其早期起步来判断，就像汽车改变社会的潜力不能根据 1900 年你在周围看到的东西来判断一样。我们预计网络经济将经历几个阶段的发展。

We would concede to the critics that a recital of the tasks you could have undertaken through the Internet in 1998 might seem mundane. There is, after all, nothing terribly revolutionary about reading an article about gardening on the Net, or buying a case of wine long-distance. However, the potential of the cybereconomy cannot be judged solely on its early beginnings, any more than the potential of the automobile to transform society could have been judged by what you could have seen around you in 1900. We expect the cybereconomy to evolve through several stages.

1. 信息时代最原始的表现形式是，网络只是一种信息媒介，用于促进原本普通的工业时代交易。此时，网络只不过是一种奇特的目录传递系统。例如，虚拟葡萄园是第一批网络商人之一，它只是通过万维网上的一个页面销售葡萄酒。此类交易尚未直接颠覆旧制度。它们使用工业货币，并在可识别的管辖范围内进行。互联网的这些用途几乎没有这种大政治影响。

1. The most primitive manifestations of the Information Age involve the Net simply as an information medium to facilitate what are otherwise ordinary industrial-era transactions. At this point, the Net is no more than an exotic delivery system for catalogues. Virtual Vineyards, for example, one of the first cybermerchants, simply sells wine from a page on the World Wide Web. Such transactions are not yet directly subversive of the old institutions. They employ industrial currency, and take place within identifiable jurisdictions. These uses of the Internet have little such megapolitical impact.

2. 互联网商务的中间阶段将以工业时代不可能实现的方式运用信息技术，例如远程会计或医疗诊断。下面将详细说明这些先进计算能力的新应用的更多示例。网络商务的第二阶段仍将在旧的制度框架内运作，使用国家货币并受民族国家的管辖。使用网络进行销售的商家不会将其用于银行业务，而只会用于赚取收入。这些在互联网交易中获得的利润仍需纳税。

2. An intermediate stage of Internet commerce will employ information technology in ways that would have been impossible in the industrial era, such as in long-distance accounting or medical diagnosis. More examples of these new applications of advanced computational power are spelled out below. The second stage of Net commerce will still function within the old institutional framework, employing national currencies and submitting to the jurisdiction of nation-states. The merchants who employ the Net for sales will not yet employ it to bank their profits, only to earn revenues. These profits made on Internet transactions will still be subject to taxation.

3. 更高级的阶段将标志着向真正的网络商务的过渡。交易不仅将通过网络进行，而且将超越民族国家的管辖范围。付款将以网络货币进行。利润将记入网络银行。投资将通过网络经纪进行。许多交易将不征税。在这个阶段，网络商务将开始产生我们已经概述的重大的超级政治后果。政府对传统经济领域的权力将因新的逻辑而改变网络。域外监管权力将崩溃。司法管辖权将下放。企业结构将发生变化，工作和就业性质也将发生变化。

3. A more advanced stage will mark the transition to true cybercommerce. Not only will transactions occur over the Net, but they will migrate outside the jurisdiction of nation-states. Payment will be rendered in cybercurrency. Profits will be booked in cyberbanks. Investments will be made in cyberbrokerages. Many transactions will not be subject to taxation. At this stage, cybercommerce will begin to have significant megapolitical consequences of the kind we have already outlined. The powers of governments over traditional areas of the economy will be transformed by the new logic of the Net. Extraterritorial regulatory power will collapse. Jurisdictions will devolve. The structure of firms will change, and so will the nature of work and employment.

信息革命各个阶段的概述仅仅是对有史以来最深远的经济转型的一个最简单的描述。

This outline of the stages of the Information Revolution is only the barest sketch of what could be the most far-reaching economic transformation ever.

商业全球化​​​​

THE GLOBALIZATION OF COMMERCE

在信息时代，大多数现有的司法管辖权优势将被技术迅速侵蚀。新类型的优势将会出现。通信成本的下降已经降低了对邻近性作为做生意必要条件的需求。1946 年，伦敦的投资者在技术上可以向纽约的经纪人下订单。但只有最大和最引人注目的交易才有理由这样做：纽约和伦敦之间三分钟的电话费用为 650 美元。今天，费用为 0.91 美元。半个世纪以来，洲际电话的价格已暴跌 99% 以上。

In the Information Age, most current jurisdictional advantages will be eroded rapidly by technology. New types of advantages will emerge. Falling communications costs have already reduced the need for proximity as a necessary condition of doing business. In 1946, it was technically possible for an investor in London to place an order with a broker in New York. But only the largest and most compelling transaction would have justified doing so: a three-minute phone call between New York and London cost $650. Today, it costs $0.91. The price of an intercontinental phone call has plunged by more than 99 percent in half a century.

融合通信

Convergent Communication

很快，洲际聊天和本地电话之间的区别就会变得微乎其微。同样，电话、计算机和电视之间的区别也可能变得微乎其微。所有这些都将是交互式通信设备，从人体工程学角度而非功能角度更容易区分。您将能够使用个人计算机上的麦克风和扬声器通过互联网进行语音对话。或者看电影。您将能够与电视对话，并通过电视娱乐媒体提供的网络传输大量数据。随着工业时代各种通信形式之间的区别逐渐消失，成本大幅下降，越来越多的服务将按使用时间而不是根据消息目的地向您收费。在世界任何地方进行通话或数据传输的费用将仅比 1985 年大多数司法管辖区的本地电话费用高一点。

Soon, the difference between intercontinental chat and a local call may be minimal. So, too, may be the differences among your telephone, your computer, and your television. All will be interactive communications devices, more easily distinguished on ergonomic than functional grounds. You will be able to hold a voice conversation over the Internet using microphones and speakers on your personal computer. Or watch a movie. You will be able to talk back to your television, and communicate vast amounts of data through the network provided by the television entertainment media. As the industrial-era distinction between various forms of communication breaks down and costs plunge, more and more services will bill you by time of use rather than according to the destination of your messages. Conversation or data transmission anywhere in the world will cost little more than a local call did in most jurisdictions in 1985.

无线互联网

Internet Unwired

低轨道卫星和其他无线技术方法将直接向你口袋里的寻呼机、便携式电脑或工作站来回传输信息，而无需与本地电话运营或电视有线系统进行交互。简而言之，互联网将不再是有线的。由于相对早期无线媒体的数据传输速度较慢，而且很难“听到”来自用户设备（其中一些是移动的和电池供电的）的微弱信号。尽管如此，这些技术问题将随着带宽的增加而得到解决。

Low-orbit satellites and other approaches to wireless technology will transmit feeds back and forth directly to a beeper in your pocket, a portable computer, or a workstation, without interfacing with a local telephone operating or TV cable system at all. In short, the Internet will be unwired. The first steps in that direction are bound to be halting because of the relatively slow speed of data transmission in the early wireless media and the difficulties of “hearing” weak signals broadcast from subscriber devices, some of which will be mobile and battery-powered. Nonetheless, these technical problems will be tackled and solved as bandwidth increases.

商业无国界

Business Without Borders

计算能力的不断扩展将带来更好的压缩技术，从而加快数据流。现有公钥/私钥加密算法的广泛采用将允许卫星系统等提供商将计费功能纳入服务，从而降低成本。在提供服务的同时，供应商将能够从个人电脑上加载的账户中扣款，就像法国电信从巴黎电话亭使用的“智能卡”中扣款一样。

Continued expansion of computational power will lead to better compression technology, speeding data flow. Widespread adoption of existing public key/ private key encryption algorithms will allow providers, such as satellite systems, to incorporate the billing function into the service, lowering costs. Simultaneous with the service, vendors will be able to debit accounts loaded on personal computers in much the way that France Telecom debits the “smart cards” employed in Paris phone boxes.

你的手机就是银行

Your Phone Becomes a Bank

不同之处在于，在不久的将来，你将能够通过各种交易获得账户积分，并随身携带电话亭。你的个人电脑将成为你的银行和全球货币经纪公司的分支机构，以及你购买匿名电话卡的巴黎售货亭。就像智能卡付费电话如果被撬棍撬开，对小偷来说毫无用处一样，你的电脑只有能够破解或操纵复杂计算机代码的人才能入侵。这样一来，很多能够操纵撬棍的恶棍就无处可逃了。有了适当的加密，你的电脑中的任何东西都无法被解密或滥用。

The difference is that in the near future, you will be able to earn credits to your account with all manner of transactions and carry your phone box with you. Your PC will be the branch office of your bank and global money brokerage, as well as the equivalent of the Paris kiosk where you buy your anonymous phone card. And like the smart-card pay phones that are useless to thieves if broken open with a crowbar, your computer could only be raided by someone capable of breaking or manipulating sophisticated computer code. That would leave out a lot of ruffians capable of manipulating a crowbar. With proper encryption, nothing in your computer could be deciphered or misused.

到本世纪初，你将能够在南极洲以北的几乎任何地方开展业务。任何有线或数字蜂窝电话可用的地方。任何使用交互式有线电视系统的地方。任何卫星在头顶或其他无线传输系统到位的地方。你将能够随意通过虚拟现实跨越国界和边界进行通话、传输数据和旅行。通过区号识别说话者所在地的电话号码可能会被通用接入号码取代，通用接入号码将能够联系到你想在地球上任何地方通信的人。铱星就是一个例证。

By the turn of the millennium, you will be able to transact business almost anywhere north of Antarctica. Anywhere wired or digital cellular telephone is available. Anywhere interactive cable television systems are in use. Anywhere a satellite is overhead or other wireless transmission systems are in place. You will be able to speak, transmit data, and journey via virtual reality over borders and boundaries at will. Telephone numbers that identify the locale of the speaker by area codes are likely to be superseded by universal access numbers, which will reach the party with whom you wish to communicate anywhere on the planet. Witness Iridium.

理解中文

Understanding Chinese

你不仅会说话、发传真，而且随着时间的推移，你将能够缩短多年的学习过程，用中文与上海的工厂领班交谈。不会说中文将不再是问题他的语言或方言。他的话可能是中文，但你会听到粗略地翻译成英文。他会用中文听到你的谈话。随着时间的推移，使用即时翻译的能力将大大增加语言和习语障碍迄今为止一直很大的地区的竞争。当这种情况发生时，中国政府可能不希望拨打电话，这无关紧要。

You will not only be able to talk and send a fax. In time, you will be able to shorten a multiyear learning process and converse in Chinese with a factory foreman in Shanghai. It will no longer matter as much that you do not speak his language or dialect. His words may be in Chinese but you will hear them roughly translated into English. He will hear your conversation in Chinese. In time, the capacity to employ instantaneous translation will significantly increase competition in regions where obstacles of language and idiom have heretofore been significant When that happens, it will matter little or not at all that the Chinese government may not wish the call to be placed.

定制媒体

Customized Media

随着世界联系越来越紧密，你们将拥有比历史上任何时候都更大的机会来定制你们在世界的特定位置。甚至你们定期从媒体获得的信息也将是你们选择的信息。大众媒体将成为个性化媒体。如果你对国际象棋最感兴趣，或者你是一个热衷于猫的爱好者，你将能够安排你的晚间新闻广播，以突出对你来说重要的关于猫或国际象棋的信息。你不再需要依赖丹·拉瑟或英国广播公司来获取新闻。你将能够选择按照你的指示编译和编辑的新闻。

As the world grows closer together, you will have a greater opportunity than at any time in history to customize your particular place in it. Even the information you receive on a regular basis from the media will be information of your choosing. The mass media will become the individualized media. If you are interested in chess above all else, or are a keen cat fancier, you will be able to program your evening news broadcast to feature information important to you about cats or chess. No longer will you be at the mercy of Dan Rather or the BBC for the news that reaches you. You will be able to select news compiled and edited according to your instructions.

从大规模生产到定制生产

From Mass to Customized Production

如果消息不灵通，您可以访问万维网上的虚拟目录。如果您看到一条几乎喜欢的裤子，您可以在下订单时调整裤脚的宽度。马来西亚的机器人会根据扫描到您的计算机并通过网络传输的照片，根据您的身材进行量身定制。

If the news is slow, you can access a virtual catalogue on the World Wide Web. If you see a pair of trousers that you almost like, you can adjust the width of the cuff when you place your order. It will be custom-cut and tailored to fit your body by robots in Malaysia from photographs scanned into your computer and transmitted through the Net.

网络经纪

Cyberbroking

您将能够使用电子货币进行投资以及支付服务和产品费用。如果您居住在像美国这样对您的投资选择进行严格监管的司法管辖区，您可以选择将您的活动设在允许自由进行各种投资选择的司法管辖区。无论您住在克利夫兰还是贝洛奥里藏特，您都可以在百慕大、开曼群岛、里约热内卢或布宜诺斯艾利斯开展投资业务。无论您身在何处，随着网络经济的发展，数字资源的使用范围都会扩大。您将能够使用专家系统来帮助选择您的投资，并使用网络会计师和簿记员实时监控您的持股进展情况。

You will be able to use cybermoney to make investments as well as pay for services and products. If you live in a jurisdiction like the United States that heavily regulates your investment options, you can choose to domicile your activities in a jurisdiction that permits the freedom to pursue a full range of investment options. Whether you live in Cleveland or Belo Horizonte, you can do your investment business in Bermuda, the Cayman Islands, Rio de Janeiro, or Buenos Aires. Wherever you find yourself, the use of digital resources will widen as the cybereconomy evolves. You will be able to employ expert systems to help select your investments, and cyberaccountants and -bookkeepers to monitor the progress of your holdings on a real-time basis.

虚拟文化

Virtual Culture

当你不查看损益数据时，你可以虚拟参观卢浮宫。你的旅行可能需要你向比尔盖茨支付相当于三分之一便士的版税，或者向购买了虚拟现实参观博物馆权利的有同样远见的人支付版税。当你在想蒙娜丽莎的牙齿是否有问题时，你的电脑可能正在下载 SI Hsiung 翻译的《西厢记》。在您选择的时间，您的个人通信系统将像古代吟游诗人一样大声朗读文本。多任务程序将允许您同时执行多项功能。

When you are not reviewing profit-and-loss data, you may take a virtual visit to the Louvre. Your trip may require you to pay a royalty payment equivalent to one-third of a penny to Bill Gates, or someone of equal foresight who has purchased the virtual-reality rights to tour the museum. While you are wondering whether the Mona Lisa had trouble with her teeth, your computer could be downloading S. I. Hsiung’s translation of The Romance of the Western Chamber. At times of your choosing, your personal communications system will read the text aloud like a bard of old. Multitasking programs will allow you to perform many functions simultaneously.

在网上寻找管辖权

Shopping for Jurisdictions on the Net

如果您从经典作品中受到启发，您可以组织一个虚拟公司，通过三维视网膜显示器销售著名文学作品的戏剧作品。图像将不再投射到空中，而是通过每秒波动五万次的低能激光直接投射到观众的视网膜上。这项技术已由华盛顿西雅图的 Micro Vision 开发，它将使许多法定盲人重见光明。在开展该项目之前，您可以指示您的数字助理调查马来西亚、中国、秘鲁、巴西和捷克共和国的制造设施的当前合同保护要约。当您选择一个地点时，您将能够在一小时内在巴哈马成立您的公司，由圣乔治信托公司提供。您的指示将把公司的所有流动资产存入一个网络银行的网络账户中，该银行同时在纽芬兰、开曼群岛、乌拉圭、阿根廷和列支敦士登设立。如果任何一个司法管辖区试图撤销经营权或扣押储户的资产，这些资产将自动以光速转移到另一个司法管辖区。

If you are inspired by your dose of the classics, you can organize a virtual corporation to market dramatic productions of famous literature for viewing through three-dimensional retinal display. Instead of being projected into the air, the images will be projected directly onto the retinas of viewers with low-energy lasers fluctuating fifty thousand times a second. This technology, already under development by Micro Vision of Seattle, Washington, will allow many persons who are legally blind to see. Before undertaking the project, you could instruct your digital assistant to canvass the current contract offers of protection for manufacturing facilities in Malaysia, China, Peru, Brazil, and the Czech Republic. When you pick a location, you will be able to have your company incorporated in one hour in the Bahamas, courtesy of the St. George’s Trust Company. Your instructions will place all the company’s liquid assets in a cyberaccount in a cyberbank that is domiciled simultaneously in Newfoundland, the Cayman Islands, Uruguay, Argentina, and Liechtenstein. If any of the jurisdictions attempt to withdraw operating authority or seize the assets of depositors, the assets will automatically be transferred to another jurisdiction at the speed of light.

质的进步​

QUALITATIVE ADVANCES

你很快就能在网络空间进行的许多交易在工业时代是不可能实现的，这不仅仅是因为它们跨越了语言障碍。让你的数字助理查找匈牙利科学期刊上发表的未翻译文章与和图书管理员交谈在本质上是不同的。在五千英里之外参加牛津辅导课与在离 Carfax 六英里以内睡觉时参加辅导课是不一样的。在酒吧玩轮盘赌蒙特卡洛巴黎大酒店是一种新奇的体验，你可以在乌拉圭埃斯特角城的一场派对上通过虚拟现实来实现这一体验。

Many of the transactions you soon will be able to perform in cyberspace would have been impossible in the Industrial Age, and not simply because they cross a language barrier. Sending your digital assistants to locate untranslated articles published in Hungarian scientific journals is qualitatively different from talking to a librarian. Sitting in on an Oxford tutorial from a distance of five thousand miles is not the same as taking the tutorial when you are sleeping within six miles of Carfax. And playing the roulette wheel at the Hotel de Paris, Monte Carlo, is a novel experience when you can do it via virtual reality from a party at Punte del Este, Uruguay.

拜访网络医生

A Cybervisit to the Cyberdoctor

很快，各种活动将迁移到网络经济中，以新颖的方式结合各种技术，超越地点专制和工业经济的陈旧机构，而速度将比许多专家现在认为的要快。不久的将来，如果你肚子疼，你将能够咨询数字医生，这是一个对症状、疾病和解药了如指掌的专家系统。它将以加密形式访问你的病史，询问你的疼痛是饭后还是饭前发生，是剧烈的还是钝痛的，是持续性的还是偶发性的。无论医生问什么问题，数字医生都会问。它可能会判断你是喝了太多酒，还是喝得太少。你可能会被转诊给网络专家。如果你需要手术，百慕大的网络外科医生可以借助进行微切口的专用设备远程为你实施手术。

In short order, faster than many experts now think possible, activities will migrate into the cybereconomy that combine technologies in novel ways to transcend the tyranny of place and the antiquated institutions of the industrial economy. One day soon, if you have a stomachache, you will be able to consult a digital doctor, an expert system with an encyclopedic knowledge of symptoms, maladies, and antidotes. It will access your medical history in encrypted form, ask whether your pain happens after eating or before meals. Whether it is sharp or dull, persistent or episodic. Whatever questions doctors ask, the digital doctor will ask. It may determine that you drink too much wine, or not enough. You may be referred to a cyberspecialist. If you need an operation, a cybersurgeon in Bermuda may perform the operation long-distance with the aid of specialized equipment that performs micro-incisions.

生死信息处理

Life-and-Death Information Processing

这听起来可能像科幻小说。但网络手术的许多组件已经到位。当你读到这本书时，其他组件也将开始发挥作用。通用电气公司已向全球 15 家医院推出了一种新型磁共振治疗机 (MRT)。该机器预计将经历三年的研发阶段，但此后可能会迅速普及并成为许多类型手术的常态。这是技术改变社会的一个例子，但是一个很好的例子。

This may sound like science fiction. But many of the components of cybersurgery are already in place. Others will be functional by the time you read this book. General Electric has introduced a new magnetic resonance treatment machine (MRT) into fifteen hospitals around the world. The machine is expected to have a three-year research-and-development phase, but after that it is likely to spread rapidly and become a norm for many types of surgery. It is one example, but a good one, of the way in which technology is changing society.

我们大多数人都熟悉磁共振成像 (MRI) 机器，磁共振技术用于为医生提供软组织图像以供诊断。它们比 X 射线或超声波提供更好的软组织图像，已成为现代诊断技术的重要组成部分，尤其是在癌症诊断中。然而，它们目前有两个显著的​​局限性。管道不允许自由进入患者；机器功率有限。

Most of us are familiar with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machines, in which magnetic resonance techniques are used to provide doctors with soft-tissue images for diagnostic purposes. They provide better images of soft tissues than X-rays or ultrasound, and have become an essential part of modern diagnostic techniques, particularly in cancers. They have, however, two significant limitations at present. The tube does not allow free access to the patient; the machines are of limited power.

网络手术

Cybersurgery

通用电气公司重新设计了磁共振机器，使其既可用于诊断，也可用于治疗。功率提高了五倍。实际上，管道被切成两半，因此患者将躺在磁共振成像（MRT）是一种将磁共振成像（MRI）技术应用于肿瘤治疗的新方法，它被安置在两个环形单元之间，而不是完全封闭。外科医生无需拍摄图像，然后根据图像实施手术，而是可以在手术过程中看到自己正在做的事情。MRT 将与使用微技术的非侵入性或微创手术相结合。外科医生不必用手术刀做大切口，而是用探针做微切口，并在手术过程中看到探针显示的内容。他将根据图像实施手术，而不必直视身体。原则上，探针可以在远处操作。它们将能够使用激光或低温（加热或冷冻）设备高精度地摧毁肿瘤。

General Electric has redesigned magnetic resonance machines so that they can be used for treatment as well as diagnosis. The power has been upped five times. The tube has, in effect, been cut in two, so the patient will lie between two doughnut-shaped units, rather than being fully enclosed. Instead of taking an image and then performing surgery in the light of that image, the surgeon will be able to see what he is doing as he does it. MRT will be combined with noninvasive, or less invasive, surgery using microtechniques. Instead of having to make large incisions with scalpels, the surgeon will make micro incisions with probes, and will be able to see what the probes reveal as he operates. He will perform the surgery from the image rather than by looking directly into the body. In principle, the probes will be operable from a distance. They will be able to destroy tumors with laser or cryogenic—heating or freezing—devices of great precision.

这将使目前不可能进行的手术成为可能，特别是在神经外科，因为肿瘤通常位于大脑的重要部位附近。它还将使重复手术成为可能，因为传统外科手术的创伤无法重复，否则会造成不可接受的损伤。

This will permit operations that are now impossible, particularly in neurosurgery, where tumors often lie very close to essential parts of the brain. It will also permit repeated operations, when the trauma of the traditional surgical operation cannot be repeated without unacceptable damage.

一些研究人员认为，到 2010 年，软组织手术刀可能会被看作过时的遗物。如果这是真的，那么人们对手术的恐惧和余震将会消失。显然，这对患者来说是个好消息。现在的手术需要几个小时才能完成，之后还要住院几天或几周，而现在只需要半个小时，可能根本不需要住院。事实上，外科医生和患者可能永远不会在同一个房间里。但这会对医院和外科医生产生什么影响呢？

Some researchers believe that the knife for soft-tissue surgery may be looked back on as an obsolete relic by 2010. A lot of fear, and much of the aftershock, will be taken out of surgery if that is true. Obviously, this is very good news for the patient. Operations which now take hours to perform, and have to be followed by days or weeks in the hospital, will take only half an hour, and may not require hospitalization at all. Indeed, the surgeon and the patient may never even be in the same room. But what will this do to hospitals and surgeons?

更少的显微外科医生做更多的事情

Fewer Microsurgeons Doing More

外科手术将会发生一场革命。在培训中，三分之一的年轻外科医生未能掌握显微外科手术所需的技能。三分之一的人勉强能做，三分之一的人则变得非常出色。在高级外科医生的转换课程中也发现了类似的比例。更少的外科医生将能够在更短的时间内进行更多的手术。医疗保险公司和寻求手术的个人可能会坚持要求每位外科医生提供结果统计数据，而这些数据将有很大差异。患者将希望去找能做出最佳手术效果的外科医生，特别是当他们的病情危及生命时。在某些情况下，最好的外科医生可能会远程手术。他们可能会在另一个税收较低且法院不受理过高医疗事故索赔的司法管辖区进行整个手术。

There will be a revolution in surgery. In training, a third of young surgeons have failed to acquire the skills needed for microsurgery. A third are just able to do it, and a third become excellent. Similar proportions are found in conversion courses for senior surgeons. Fewer surgeons will be able to carry out more operations in a shorter time. It is likely that health care insurers and individuals seeking surgery will insist on outcome statistics for each surgeon, which will vary rather widely. Patients will want to go to surgeons who produce the best results, particularly if their conditions are life-threatening. In some cases, the best surgeons may operate long-distance. They may perform the whole operation from another jurisdiction where taxes are lower and courts do not honor exorbitant malpractice claims.

数字律师

Digital Lawyers

在同意进行手术之前，技术娴熟的外科医生可能会请一位数字律师起草一份即时合同，根据磁共振机器显示的图像中肿瘤的大小和特征来规定和限制责任。数字律师将是能够自动选择合同条款的信息检索系统，采用神经网络等人工智能流程来定制私人合同，以满足跨国法律条件。大多数高价值或重要交易的参与者不仅会寻找合适的合作伙伴开展业务；他们还会寻找合适的交易住所。

Before agreeing to perform an operation, the skilled surgeon will probably call upon a digital lawyer to draft an instant contract that specifies and limits liability based upon the size and characteristics of the tumor revealed in images displayed by the magnetic resonance machine. Digital lawyers will be information-retrieval systems that automate selection of contract provisions, employing artificial intelligence processes such as neural networks to customize private contracts to meet transnational legal conditions. Participants in most high-value or important transactions will not only shop for suitable partners with whom to conduct a business; they will also shop for a suitable domicile for their transactions.

紧急咨询

Emergency Consultation

继续以网络手术为例，信息时代的技术将对外科手术中最高技能给予奖励，几乎在每一项工作中都是如此。自从有了手术刀以来，患者就愿意支付这样的高额费用。但由于信息有限，而且在紧急情况下很难在任何地方找到外科医生，因此外科手术市场非常不完善。信息时代的市场将不会那么不完善。如果患者需要在 24 小时甚至 45 分钟内接受手术，他可以委托数字助理远程找到全球十位可以执行此类任务的顶级外科医生，查看他们在类似病例中的成功率，并向相应的数字助手征求针对他们特定病例的报价。所有这些都可以在几分钟内完成。因此，最受青睐的 10% 外科医生将在全球外科手术市场中占有更大的份额。MRT 机器加上显微手术技术将提高他们工作的报酬。技术较低的外科医生将专注于剩余的本地市场。

To continue the example of cybersurgery, the technology of the Information Age will place a premium on the highest skills in surgery, as it will in almost every endeavor. Patients have been willing to pay such a premium for as long as there have been knives. But limits on information and the difficulty of shopping for surgeons in an emergency in any given locale made the market for surgery a very imperfect one. It will be less imperfect in the Information Age. A patient facing the need for an operation in twenty-four hours, or perhaps even forty-five minutes, could deputize digital assistants to locate the top ten surgeons worldwide available to perform such a task remotely, review their success rates in similar cases, and solicit offers for their particular case from corresponding digital servants. All of this could be canvassed in a matter of moments. As a consequence, the most-favored 10 percent of surgeons will have a far larger share in the global market for surgery. The MRT machine, plus microsurgery techniques, will raise the premium for their work. Surgeons with less skill will focus on residual local markets.

这个生死攸关的例子有助于说明经济从地点的专制中解放出来的一些革命性后果。有人可能会反对说，通用电气的 MRT 机器本来就不适合远距离使用。也许吧，但这没有抓住要点。它或一些类似的设备很快就会成为现实。当外科医生看着屏幕比直接看着病人能更好地进行手术时，外科医生和他的屏幕在哪里就不再那么重要了。越来越多的服务注定要重新配置，以反映这样一个事实：信息技术使全球任何地方的人们都能在手术这样微妙的事情上进行互动。

This life-and-death example helps suggest some of the revolutionary consequences of the liberation of economies from the tyranny of place. Someone may object that General Electric’s MRT machine was not meant to be employed long-distance. Perhaps, but this misses the point. It or some equipment like it soon will be. When operations are better performed by surgeons watching a screen than looking at the patient directly, it will matter less than we now suppose where the surgeon and his screen are located. Increasing numbers of services are destined to be reconfigured to reflect the fact that information technology allows persons anywhere on the globe to interact in even so delicate a matter as surgery.

在对设备精度要求较低、故障风险较低的活动中，网络经济将更加迅速地蓬勃发展。

In activities that require less precise equipment, and involve lower risks of failure, the cybereconomy will flourish even more rapidly.

“福利国家的财政政策要求财富拥有者没有办法保护自己。”

—艾伦·格林斯潘

“The financial policy of the welfare state requires that there be no way for the owners of wealth to protect themselves.”

—ALAN GREENSPAN

强迫评估​​​​

THE DEVALUATION OF COMPULSION

在几乎每一个竞争领域，包括世界上大多数数万亿美元的投资活动，交易向网络空间的迁移都将受到一种近乎液压的推动，即避免掠夺性税收的动力，包括通货膨胀对每个以国家货币持有财富的人征收的税。

In almost every competitive area, including most of the world’s multitrillion-dollar investment activity, the migration of transactions into cyberspace will be driven by an almost hydraulic pressure—the impetus to avoid predatory taxation, including the tax that inflation places upon everyone who holds his wealth in a national currency.

摆脱保护骗局

Escaping the Protection Racket

你无需对信息时代的超级政治进行长时间思考，就能意识到，最富裕的工业国家理所当然地向其公民征收的掠夺性税收和通货膨胀在网络空间的新前沿将极其缺乏竞争力。千禧年后不久，任何以目前征收的税率缴纳所得税的人都是出于自愿。正如弗雷德里克·C·莱恩指出的那样，历史表明，“在边境和公海上，没有人可以长期垄断使用暴力，商人避免支付高额的勒索，因为这样可以通过其他更便宜的方式获得保护。” ¹¹

You do not need to think long about the megapolitics of the Information Age to realize that predatory taxes and inflation of the kind imposed as a matter of right by the wealthiest industrial countries upon their citizens will be preposterously uncompetitive on the new frontier of cyberspace. Soon after the turn of the millennium, anyone who pays income taxes at rates currently imposed will be doing so out of choice. As Frederic C. Lane pointed out, history shows that on “the frontiers and on the high seas, where no one had an enduring monopoly in the use of violence, merchants avoided payment of exactions which were so high that protection could be obtained more cheaply by other means.”¹¹

网络经济恰恰提供了这样的一种选择。没有哪个政府能够垄断它。它所包含的信息技术将为金融资产提供比大多数政府曾经有理由提供的更便宜、更有效的保护。

The cybereconomy provides just such an alternative. No government will be able to monopolize it. And the information technologies comprised by it will provide cheaper and more effective protection for financial assets than most governments ever had reason to provide.

复利的黑魔法

The Black Magic of Compound Interest

请记住，假设您只能实现 10% 的资本回报率，那么在四十年内，每年每缴纳 5,000 美元的税款就会使您的净资产减少 220 万美元。如果回报率为 20%，复合损失将膨胀至约 4,400 万美元。对于高税收国家的高收入者来说，掠夺性税收在一生中造成的累计损失是惊人的。大多数人的损失将超过他们曾经拥有的。

Remember, each $5,000 of annual tax payments paid over forty years slashes your net worth by $2.2 million, assuming you could realize just a 10 percent return on your capital. At a 20 percent return, the compound loss balloons to about $44 million. For high-income earners in a high-tax country, the cumulative losses from predatory taxation over a lifetime are staggering. Most will lose more than they ever had.

这听起来不可能，但数学计算却一目了然。你可以用计算器自己验证一下。美国最富有的 1% 纳税人每年平均缴纳超过 125,000 美元的联邦所得税。只需支付其中的一小部分，即每年 45,000 美元，人们就可以在瑞士享受私人税收协定，享受世界上最诚实的警察和司法系统提供的法律和秩序。从这个角度来看，每年超过这一慷慨水平的 80,000 美元额外所得税很可能被归类为作为贡品或掠夺。考虑到警察保护应是公共物品，四万五千美元对于维持法律和秩序来说无疑是一笔不小的开支。理论上，公共物品可以以零边际成本扩展到更多用户。瑞士人很高兴你每年支付 45,000 美元（50,000 瑞士法郎）的协商固定税，因为他们每年从每个签约的百万富翁身上赚取 45,000 美元的利润。

This sounds impossible, but the mathematics are clear. It is something that you can confirm for yourself with a pocket calculator. The top 1 percent of taxpayers in the United States pay an average of more than $125,000 in federal income taxes annually. For a fraction of that amount, $45,000 a year, one would be welcome to live under a private tax treaty in Switzerland, and enjoy law and order provided by what is arguably the most honest police and judicial system in the world. From this perspective, the additional $80,000 a year of income tax paid above that generous level might well be classified as tribute or plunder. Forty-five thousand dollars is certainly a substantial payment toward the maintenance of law and order, considering that police protection is meant to be a public good. In theory, public goods can be extended to additional users at a marginal cost of zero. The Swiss are glad to have you pay a negotiated fixed tax of $45,000 (50,000 Swiss francs) per year because they make an annual profit of $45,000 on every millionaire who signs up.

与瑞士的替代方案相比，对于平均回报率为 20% 的投资者而言，按美国税率缴纳联邦所得税将导致其一生损失 7.05 亿美元。但请记住，这是假设每年纳税 4.5 万美元。与百慕大等避税天堂相比，那里的所得税为零，按美国税率纳税将导致其一生损失约 11 亿美元。

Compared to the Swiss alternative, the lifetime losses from paying federal income tax at U.S. rates would be $705 million for an investor who could average a 20 percent rate of return. But remember, that assumes an annual tax payment of $45,000. Compared to a tax haven like Bermuda, where the income tax is zero, the lifetime loss for paying taxes at American rates would be about $1.1 billion.

你可能会反对说，20%的年回报率已经很高了。毫无疑问你是对的。但考虑到亚洲近几十年的惊人增长，世界上许多投资者都取得了这一成绩，甚至更好。自1950年以来，香港房地产的年复合回报率一直超过20%。即使是一些增长不那么明显的经济体也提供了轻松获得高额利润的机会。过去30年，你在巴拉圭银行的美元存款平均每年可以获得30%以上的真实回报率。有些地方比其他地方更容易实现高投资回报，但熟练的投资者在好年景肯定能获得20%或更高的利润，即使他们的表现不能一直与乔治·索罗斯或沃伦·巴菲特相媲美。

You may object that an annual return of 20 percent is a high rate of return. No doubt you would be right. But given the startling growth in Asia in recent decades, many investors in the world have achieved that and better. The compound rate of return in Hong Kong real estate since 1950 has been more than 20 percent per annum. Even some economies that are less widely known for growth have afforded easy opportunities for high profits. You could have pocketed an average real return of more than 30 percent annually in U.S. dollar deposits in Paraguayan banks over the last three decades. High investment returns are easier to realize in some places than others, but skilled investors can certainly achieve profits of 20 percent or more in good years, even if they do not consistently match the performances of George Soros or Warren Buffet.

显然，您从资本中获得的回报率越高，掠夺性收入和资本利得税所施加的机会成本就越大。但得出的结论是损失巨大，甚至比您可能积累的总财富还要多，这并不取决于您是否能够实现超乎寻常的回报率。在美国运营的一些共同基金在半个多世纪以来平均年收益率超过 10%。如果您的业绩没有比这更好，而且您是美国收入最高的 1%，那么您的净资产仅因您每年支付的超过 45,000 美元的所得税就减少了 3300 多万美元。与没有所得税的司法管辖区相比，损失为 5500 万美元。

Obviously, the higher the rate of return that you could earn on your capital, the greater the opportunity costs that predatory income and capital gains taxes impose. But the conclusion that the loss is huge, indeed greater than the total amount of wealth that you may ever accumulate, does not depend upon your being able to achieve outlandish rates of return. Some mutual funds operating in the United States have averaged annual gains of more than 10 percent for more than half a century. If you could do no better than that and you are among the top 1 percent of American earners, then your net worth is reduced by more than $33 million just by the income tax you pay in excess of $45,000 annually. Compared to a jurisdiction without income tax, the loss is $55 million.

55美元而不是5500万美元

$55 Rather Than $55 Million

如果经济学家的利润最大化假设是正确的（我们认为它们通常是正确的），那么你可以做出的一个更确定的预测是，如果可以的话，大多数人都会采取行动挽救 5500 万美元。也就是说我们的预测。当高税收国家的成功人士更加清楚复利的黑魔法时，他们将开始认真地在不同的司法管辖区之间进行选择，就像他们现在购买汽车或比较保险费率一样。如果你对此表示怀疑，只需在纽约或多伦多的街道上随机拦住行人，问他们是否愿意以 5500 万美元的价格搬到百慕大。这个问题本身就说明了一切。它所带来的困境让人想起马克·吐温在决定是愿意与赤身裸体的莉莲·拉塞尔共度一夜还是与身着全套制服的格兰特将军共度一夜时所想象的困境。他没有考虑很久。成熟福利国家的居民，尤其是美国的居民，可能反应较慢，但这只是因为他们还没有意识到自己面临的选择。随着时间的推移，他们会意识到的。你或任何渴望过上更好生活的人都会看到减少掠夺性税收造成的损失的吸引力。你只需要在网络空间进行交易。当然，这在许多司法管辖区都是非法的。但旧法律很少能抵挡新技术。20 世纪 80 年代，在美国发送传真是违法的。美国邮政局认为传真属于一等邮件，美国邮政局自称拥有这项服务的垄断权。为此，美国邮政局颁布了一项法令，重申所有传真必须发送到最近的邮局，以便通过普通邮件投递。数十亿传真之后，尚不清楚是否有人遵守过这项法律。如果有，遵守情况也只是昙花一现。在新兴的网络经济中运营的优势甚至比绕过邮局发送传真更具吸引力。

If the profit-maximizing assumptions of economists are correct, as we believe they generally are, one of the more certain predictions you could make is that most people would act to salvage $55 million if they could. That is our prediction. When the black magic of compound interest becomes more clear in the minds of successful people in high-tax countries, they will begin to shop in earnest among jurisdictions, just as they now shop for automobiles or compare rates on insurance policies. If you doubt it, merely stop people at random on the streets of New York or Toronto and ask whether they would move to Bermuda for $55 million. The question answers itself. The quandary it poses is reminiscent of that Mark Twain imagined in deciding whether he would prefer to spend the night with Lillian Russell stark naked or General Grant in full dress uniform. He did not deliberate long. Residents of mature welfare states, particularly the United States, may be slower on the uptake, but only because they are not yet aware of the choice they face. In the fullness of time, they will be. You or anyone motivated by the desire to live a better life will see the attraction of reducing the losses you suffer from predatory taxation. You need merely lodge your transactions in cyberspace. This will, of course, be illegal in many jurisdictions. But old laws seldom can resist new technology. In the 1980s, it was illegal in the United States to send a fax message. The U.S. Post Office considered faxes to be first-class mail, over which the U.S. Post Office claimed an ancient monopoly. An edict to that effect was issued reiterating the requirement that all fax transmissions be routed to the nearest post office for delivery with regular mail. Billions of fax messages later, it is unclear whether anyone ever complied with that law. If so, compliance was fleeting. The advantages of operating in the emerging cybereconomy are even more compelling than sidestepping the post office in sending a fax.

公钥/私钥加密技术的广泛采用将很快使许多经济活动可以在任何你想去的地方完成。正如《战略投资》杂志技术编辑詹姆斯·贝内特所写：

Widespread adoption of public-key/private-key encryption technologies will soon allow many economic activities to be completed anywhere you please. As James Bennet, technology editor of Strategic Investment, has written:

法律的执行，尤其是税法的执行，已经严重依赖于对通信和交易的监控。一旦采取了下一步合乎逻辑的措施，离岸银行网点将提供使用公钥系统派生的账号的硬 RSA 加密电子邮件通信服务，那么在银行或通信中几乎不可能监控金融交易。即使税务机关在离岸银行安插内奸，或窃取银行记录，他们也无法识别储户^。12

Enforcement of laws and particularly tax codes has become heavily dependent on surveillance of communications and transactions. Once the next logical steps have been taken, and offshore banking locations offer the services of communication in hard RSA-encrypted electronic mail using account numbers derived from public-key systems, financial transactions will be almost impossible to monitor at the bank or in communications. Even if the tax authorities were to plant a mole in the offshore bank, or burglarize the bank records, they would not be able to identify depositors.¹²

个人将能够决定在何处开展经济活动以及愿意缴纳多少所得税，这在以前是不可能做到的。信息时代的许多交易根本不需要在任何领土主权国家进行。那些需要进行的交易将越来越多地在百慕大、开曼群岛、乌拉圭或类似的司法管辖区不对商业征收所得税或其他昂贵的交易负担。

To a degree that has never before been possible, individuals will be able to determine where to domicile their economic activities and how much income tax they prefer to pay. Many transactions in the Information Age will not need to be domiciled in any territorial sovereignty at all. Those that do will increasingly find their way to places like Bermuda, the Cayman Islands, Uruguay, or similar jurisdictions that do not impose income taxes or other costly transaction burdens on commerce.

从垄断到竞争

From Monopoly to Competition

政府已经习惯于提供“保护服务”，用弗雷德里克·C·莱恩的话来说，这些服务“质量低劣，价格高得离谱”。13^这种收取远超政府服务实际价值的习惯，是通过数个世纪的垄断发展起来的。任何看似有能力支付的人都会被无情地征税——正是因为政府垄断或近乎垄断了强制手段。这种垄断传统将与网络商务的新超级政治可能性产生深刻冲突。

Governments have become accustomed to imposing “protection services” that are, in Frederic C. Lane’s words, “of poor quality and outrageously overpriced.”¹³ This habit of charging far more than government’s services are actually worth developed through centuries of monopoly. Taxes were ruthlessly raised on anyone who seemed capable of paying—precisely because governments had a monopoly or near-monopoly on coercion. This tradition of monopoly will clash in a profound way with the new megapolitical possibilities of cybercommerce.

加密技术将使保护网络空间交易变得容易。像 PGP 这样的有效加密软件程序的成本低于全方位服务经纪人对 100 股交易收取的佣金。然而，它将使几乎所有交易在未来许多年内都变得不可见，不受政府和窃贼的攻击。信息时代的新技术将以极低的成本有效地保护网络资产。只需 55 美元而不是 5500 万美元，网络经济参与者将享受比工业时代或历史上任何时候都更好的资产实际保护。易于使用的加密算法和在陆地住所之间进行交易的能力将提供有效的保护，以抵御最大的掠夺源——民族国家本身。

Encryption will make it easy to protect transactions in cyberspace. The cost of an effective encryption software program, like PGP, is less than the commission charged by a full-service broker on a trade of one hundred shares. Yet it will render almost any transaction invisible and impervious to governments and thieves for many years to come. The new technology of the Information Age will effectively protect cyberassets at a vanishingly small cost. For $55 rather than $55 million, participants in the cybereconomy will enjoy better actual protection of their assets than they enjoyed during the industrial era or at any previous time in history. Easily used encryption algorithms and the capacity to shop between terrestrial domiciles for transactions will provide effective protection against the largest source of predation, nation-states themselves.

这并不是说领土政府将完全被击败。他们仍然能够利用个人伤害的弱点来征收人头税，甚至可能直接向富人索要赎金。他们还可以强制征收消费税。然而，保护，即政府提供的最重要的服务，将以更接近竞争的方式提供。生产者为保护而支付的成本中，可供政治当局没收和重新分配的部分将越来越少。技术创新将使世界财富中很大一部分（且这一部分还在不断增长）超出政府的掌控范围。这将降低贸易风险，用历史学家珍妮特·阿布-卢格霍德的话来说，大幅降低“所有成本的比例”，否则这些成本将不得不“分配给过境税、贡品或简单的勒索” ^。14

That is not to say that territorial governments will be entirely outmaneuvered. They will still be able to exploit vulnerabilities to personal harm in order to extract head taxes, or perhaps even hold wealthy individuals to outright ransom. They will also be able to enforce collection of consumption taxes. Yet protection, the most important service governments provide, will be put on a more nearly competitive basis. Less of the cost that productive people pay for protection will be available to be seized and reallocated by political authorities. Technological innovations will place a large and growing portion of the world’s wealth outside the reach of governments. This will reduce the risks of trade, sharply lowering, in historian Janet Abu-Lughod’s words, “the proportion of all costs” that otherwise would have had to be “allocated to transit duties, tribute, or simple extortion.”¹⁴

历史上，政府真正受到竞争制约的情况很少见。在少数类似情况发生时，政府都很软弱，各个司法管辖区的技术也差不多。正如莱恩所言，在这种情况下影响盈利能力的主要因素往往是不同司法管辖区支付的保护成本的差异。企业家。中世纪的商人必须支付 20 项通行费才能将货物运到市场，而他无法与只需支付 4 项通行费就能将相同货物送到客户手中的商人竞争。随着信息时代的到来，类似的情况注定会再次出现。盈利能力将再次取决于你是否能够最大限度地降低被迫支付的保护成本，而不是技术优势。

It has been rare in history to find governments truly constrained by competition. In the few times when something remotely like this has happened, governments were weak and technologies were similar between jurisdictions. As Lane suggested, the principal factor affecting profitability under such conditions tends to be the difference in protection costs paid by different entrepreneurs. The medieval merchant who had to pay twenty tolls to bring his goods to market could not compete with a merchant who had to pay only four tolls to deliver the same goods to the customer. Similar conditions are destined to return with the Information Age. Profitability will once again be determined not so much by technological advantage as by your success in minimizing the costs you are forced to pay for protection.

这种新的经济动态直接违背了工业时代遗留下来的政府对其保护服务实行垄断定价的愿望。但不管喜欢与否，旧制度在信息时代的新竞争环境中都将是不可行的。任何坚持向其公民征收竞争对手不缴纳的重税的政府都只能确保利润和财富流向其他地方。因此，成熟的福利国家在长期内无法削减税收，这将是自我纠正的。征收过多税的政府只会让公民在其权力范围内的任何地方居住都成为一种破产的负担。

This new economic dynamic directly contradicts the desire of government left over from the industrial era to impose monopoly pricing for its protection services. But, like it or not, the old system will be nonviable in the new competitive environment of the Information Age. Any government that insists upon lumbering its citizens with heavy taxes that competitors do not pay will merely assure that profits and wealth gravitate someplace else. Therefore, the failure of the mature welfare states to curtail taxes over the long term will be self-correcting. Governments that tax too much will simply make residence anywhere within their power a bankrupting liability.

“……国王可以凭借其特权，用他喜欢的任何材质和形式铸造货币，并确定其标准，同样，他也可以改变货币的实质和外观，提高或降低其价值，或完全贬低和废除它，……” ¹⁵

—摘自1604 年英国法庭判决

"… as the king by his prerogative may make money of what matter and form he pleaseth, and establish the standard of it, so may he change his money in substance and impression, and enhance or debase the value of it, or entirely decry and annul it,…”¹⁵

—FROM AN ENGLISH COURT DECISION, 1604

铸币税的消亡​​

THE DEATH OF SEIGNIORAGE

政府不仅将失去对多种形式的收入和资本征税的权力，而且也注定会失去对货币的强制力。过去，大政治转型与货币性质的变化有关。

Governments will not only lose their power to tax many forms of income and capital; they are also destined to lose their power of compulsion over money. In the past, megapolitical transitions have been associated with changes in the character of money.

• 铸币的引入推动了古代经济五百年扩张周期的启动，并以公元纪年诞生和现代之前的最低利率达到顶峰。
• The introduction of coinage helped launch the five-hundred-year cycle of expansion in the ancient economy that culminated with the birth of Christ and the lowest interest rates before the modern period.
• 黑暗时代的到来与铸币厂的关闭同时发生。尽管罗马货币仍在流通，但货币数量却随着贸易的减少而不断减少，形成了一种恶性循环。
• The advent of the Dark Ages coincided with virtual closure of the mints. While Roman coinage continued to circulate, quantities of money dwindled along with trade in a self-reinforcing downward spiral.
• 封建革命与货币、铸币、汇票和其他用于商业交易结算的手段的重新引入同时发生。尤其是，欧洲在德国拉梅尔斯堡新矿的白银产量激增，促进了货币流通，从而促进了商业的发展。
• The feudal revolution coincided with a reintroduction of money, coinage, bills of exchange, and other devices for settling commercial transactions. In particular, a surge in European silver production from new mines at Rammelsberg, Germany, facilitated an increase in the circulation of coin that helped lubricate commerce.
• 信息时代之前，货币领域最大的革命是工业化的出现。早期现代国家在火药革命中巩固了权力。随着控制力的增强，国家对货币施加了权力，并开始严重依赖工业化的标志性技术——印刷机。印刷机是第一个大规模生产工具，在现代时期被各国政府广泛用于大规模生产纸币。
• The greatest revolution in money prior to the Information Age came with the advent of industrialism. The early-modern state consolidated its power in the Gunpowder Revolution. As its control increased, the state asserted its power over money, and came to rely heavily upon the signature technology of industrialism, the printing press. The first implement of mass production, the printing press, has been widely used by governments in the modern period to mass-produce paper money.

纸币是一种明显的工业产品。在印刷机出现之前，复制收据或证书以成为纸币是不切实际的。当然，在抄经院里的僧侣们不会把时间花在提取五十英镑的钞票上。纸币还大大增强了国家的权力，不仅通过贬值货币获得利润，还通过让国家掌握谁可以积累财富的权力。正如阿布·卢格霍德所说，“当国家支持的纸币成为认可的货币时，反对或独立于国家机器积累资本的机会就变得困难了。” ¹⁶

Paper money is a distinctly industrial product. It would have been impractical before the printing press to duplicate receipts or certificates that became paper currency. Certainly, monks in the scriptoria would not have spent their time well drawing fifty-pound notes. Paper money also contributed significantly to the power of the state, not only by generating profits from depreciating the currency, but by giving the state leverage over who could accumulate wealth. As Abu-Lughod put it, “when paper money backed by the state become the approved currency, the chances for amassing capital in opposition to or independent of the state machinery became difficult.”¹⁶

网络现金

CYBERCASH

现在，信息时代的到来意味着货币性质的另一场革命。随着网络商务的开始，它将不可避免地导致网络货币的出现。这种新形式的货币将重新设定赔率，降低世界民族国家决定谁成为主权个人的能力。这一变化的关键部分将是由于信息技术将财富持有者从通货膨胀的剥夺中解放出来。很快，你将在通过网络或万维网进行交易的同时使用网络现金支付几乎所有交易。

Now the advent of the Information Age implies another revolution in the character of money. As cybercommerce begins, it will lead inevitably to cybermoney. This new form of money will reset the odds, reducing the capacity of the world’s nation-states to determine who becomes a Sovereign Individual. A crucial part of this change will come about because of the effect of information technology in liberating the holders of wealth from expropriation through inflation. Soon, you will pay for almost any transaction over the Net or World Wide Web at the same time you place it, using cybercash.

这种新的数字货币形式注定将在网络商务中发挥关键作用。它将由数百位素数的加密序列组成。这种货币独一无二、匿名且可验证，将适用于最大规模的交易。它还可以被分割成最小的价值部分。它将可以在无国界的数万亿美元的批发市场上一键交易。

This new digital form of money is destined to play a pivotal role in cybercommerce. It will consist of encrypted sequences of multihundred-digit prime numbers. Unique, anonymous, and verifiable, this money will accommodate the largest transactions. It will also be divisible into the tiniest fraction of value. It will be tradable at a keystroke in a multitrillion-dollar wholesale market without borders.

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Dialing Without Dollars

不可避免地，这种新的电子货币将被非国有化。当主权个人能够在没有实体的领域跨境交易时，他们将不再需要容忍政府通过通货膨胀降低其货币价值的长期做法。他们为什么要这样做呢？对货币的控制权将从权力中心转移到全球市场。任何能够进入网络空间的个人或公司都能够轻松地将任何有贬值风险的货币变现。与今天不同，交易将不再需要法定货币。事实上，在跨越全球的交易中，每笔交易中至少有一方可能会发现自己在交易一种对他来说不是法定货币的货币。

Inevitably, this new cybermoney will be denationalized. When Sovereign Individuals can deal across borders in a realm with no physical reality, they will no longer need to tolerate the long-rehearsed practice of governments degrading the value of their money through inflation. Why should they? Control over money will migrate from the halls of power to the global marketplace. Any individual or firm with access to cyberspace will be able to easily shift out of any currency that appears in danger of depreciation. Unlike today, there will be no necessity to deal in legal tender. Indeed, in transactions spanning the globe it will be likely that at least one party to every transaction will find himself dealing in a currency that is not legal tender to him.

减少易货贸易的弊端

Disadvantages of Barter Reduced

在网络经济中，你可以用任何你想要的媒介进行交易。正如已故诺贝尔经济学奖得主 FA 哈耶克所说，“货币和非货币之间没有明显的区别”。他写道，“尽管我们通常认为货币和非货币之间存在着一条清晰的分界线——法律通常试图做出这样的区分——但就货币事件的因果影响而言，并没有如此明显的区别。我们发现的是一个连续体，在这个连续体中，不同程度的流动性对象，或价值可以独立波动的对象，在它们作为货币的程度上相互影响。” ¹⁷全球计算机网络上的数字货币将使哈耶克流动性连续体上的每个对象都更具流动性——政府票据除外。一个后果是，易货贸易将变得更加实用。越来越多的物品和服务将以特定的出价来交换其他物品和服务。这些潜在的交易将在网络上广泛宣传到世界各地，这将大大提高它们的流动性。

You will be able to trade in any medium you wish in the cybereconomy. As the late Nobel Prize-winning economist F. A. Hayek argued, there is “no clear distinction between money and non-money.” He wrote, “although we usually assume there is a sharp line of distinction between what is money and what is not—and the law generally tries to make such a distinction—so far as the causal effects of monetary events are concerned, there is no such clear difference. What we find is rather a continuum in which objects of various degrees of liquidity, or with values which can fluctuate independently of each other, shade into each other in the degree to which they function as money.”¹⁷ Digital money on global computer networks will make every object on Hayek’s continuum of liquidity more liquid—except government paper. One consequence will be that barter will become far more practical. Increasing numbers of objects and services will be offered in specific bids for other objects and services. These potential transactions will be widely advertised throughout the world on the Net, which will increase their liquidity by magnitudes.

易货贸易的主要缺点之一一直是难以将有特定需求的人与有相同需求并希望获得最初提出交易的东西的人匹配起来。原始易货贸易因难以在当地市场上精确匹配希望交易的两方而受阻。现金超越了易货贸易的局限性，其优势在大多数交易中仍将引人注目。但计算能力的大幅提升和网络空间商业的全球化也减少了易货贸易的缺点。当你可以立即对全世界进行分类，而不是只从当地可能遇到的人那里寻找时，找到与你有相同需求的人的几率会大大增加。

One of the principal drawbacks of barter has always been the difficulty of matching a person with one specific demand with another who had exactly that on offer and was seeking to acquire for himself exactly what the first proposed to trade. Primitive barter stumbled over the daunting improbability of exactly matching two parties wishing to exchange in a local market. Cash transcended the limitations of barter, and its advantages will continue to be compelling in most transactions. But vast increases in computational power and the globalization of commerce in cyberspace also reduce the drawbacks of barter. The odds of finding someone with exactly reciprocal desires to yours increase dramatically when you can sort instantly across the entire world rather than drawing on only those whom you might meet locally.

不受假冒

Not Subject to Counterfeiting

虽然纸币无疑将继续流通，作为穷人和电脑文盲的剩余交换媒介，但高价值的货币交易将被私有化。电子货币将不再像工业时代的纸币那样仅以国家单位计价。它可能会以黄金的克或盎司来定义，就像黄金本身一样可以细分。或者它可能被定义为其他实际价值存储。即使使用不同的定价措施，或某些交易继续以国家货币计价，电子货币也将比国有货币更好地服务于消费者。快速发展的计算能力将减少调整价格以适应各种交换媒介的难度。每笔交易都将涉及加密的数百位素数序列的传输。与金本位时代政府发行的纸币收据不同，这些收据可以随意复制，而新的数字金本位或其易货等价物几乎不可能伪造，其基本数学原因是几乎不可能解开数百位素数的乘积。所有收据都将是可验证的唯一收据。

While paper money will no doubt remain in circulation as a residual medium of exchange for the poor and computer-illiterate, money for high-value transactions will be privatized. Cybermoney will no longer be denominated only in national units like the paper money of the industrial period. It probably will be defined in terms of grams or ounces of gold, as finely divisible as gold itself. Or it may be defined in terms of other real stores of value. Even where different pricing measures are used, or certain transactions continue to be denominated in national currencies, cybermoney will serve the consumers far better than nationalized money ever did. Rapidly advancing computational capacity will diminish the difficulties of adjusting prices to various media of exchange to the vanishing point. Each transaction will involve the transfer of encrypted multihundred-digit prime-number sequences. Unlike the paper-money receipts issued by governments during the gold-standard era, which could be duplicated at will, the new digital gold standard or its barter equivalents will be almost impossible to counterfeit for the fundamental mathematical reason that it is all but impossible to unravel the product of multihundred-digit prime numbers. All receipts will be verifiably unique.

传统货币的名称，如“英镑”和“比索”，反映了这样一个事实：它们起源于衡量特定数量贵金属的重量。英镑曾经是一磅纯银。西方的纸币最初是贵金属的仓库或保险箱收据。发行这些收据的政府很快发现，他们可以印制的收据数量远远超过他们实际可以从金银储备中赎回的数量。这很容易。任何持有黄金或白银凭证的人都无法从他的收据中辨别出有关贵金属实际供应的任何信息。除了序列号之外，所有收据看起来都一样，这一事实吸引了伪造者以及试图通过夸大货币供应量来获利的政客和银行家。

The names of traditional currencies like the “pound” and the “peso” reflect the fact that they originated as measures of weight of specific quantities of precious metals. The pound sterling was once upon a time a pound of sterling silver. Paper money in the West began as warehouse or safe-deposit receipts for quantities of precious metals. Governments issuing these receipts soon found that they could print far more of them than they could actually redeem from their supply of bullion. This was easy. No individual holding a gold or silver certificate could distinguish any information about the actual supply of precious metals from his receipt. Other than the serial numbers, all the receipts looked alike, a fact that appealed to counterfeiters as well as politicians and bankers seeking to profit from inflating the supply of money.

虚拟货币几乎不可能通过这种方式伪造，无论是官方还是非官方的。数字收据的可验证性排除了这种通过通货膨胀来掠夺财富的经典权宜之计。信息时代的新数字货币将把对交换媒介的控制权交还给希望保留财富的财富所有者，而不是希望将其偷走的民族国家。

Cybermoney will be all but impossible to counterfeit in this way, officially or unofficially. The verifiability of the digital receipts rules out this classic expedient for expropriating wealth through inflation. The new digital money of the Information Age will return control over the medium of exchange to the owners of wealth, who wish to preserve it, rather than to nation-states that wish to spirit it away.

“免费”货币的交易成本

The Transaction Cost of “Free” Currency

使用这种新的电子货币将大大解放你摆脱国家权力。之前，我们引用了过去半个世纪以来世界各国在维持货币价值方面的惨淡记录。自二战以来，没有一种货币比德国马克遭受的通货膨胀损失更小。然而即便如此，从 1949 年 1 月 1 日到 1995 年 6 月底，其价值已经蒸发了 71%。世界储备货币在此期间，美元贬值了 84%。18^这是政府利用其在法定货币上的领土垄断而掠夺的财富的衡量标准。

Use of this new cybermoney will substantially free you from the power of the state. Earlier, we cited the dreary record of the world’s nation-states in maintaining the value of their currencies over the past half century. No currency has suffered a smaller loss from inflation since World War II than the German mark. Yet even so, 71 percent of its value vanished between January 1, 1949, and the end of June 1995. The world reserve currency during this period, the U.S. dollar, lost 84 percent of its value.¹⁸ This is a measure of the wealth that governments expropriated by exploiting their territorial monopolies on legal tender.

请注意，货币贬值或名义生活成本每年上涨并不一定具有内在必然性。恰恰相反。维持储蓄购买力的技术挑战微不足道。只需查看黄金的长期购买力，您就能明白这一点。从 1949 年 1 月 1 日到 1995 年 6 月底，尽管最好的国有货币贬值了近四分之三，但黄金的购买力实际上却上升了。正如 Roy W. Jastrom 教授在其著作《黄金常数》中所记录的那样，从有可靠的价格记录可追溯到 1560 年的英国，黄金一直保持着其购买力，只有轻微的波动。

Note that there is no intrinsic necessity that currency depreciate or that the nominal cost of living rise every year. To the contrary. The technical challenge of maintaining the purchasing power of savings is trivial. You can see this merely by looking at the long-term purchasing power of gold. Between January 1, 1949, and the end of June 1995, while the best of nationalized currencies lost almost three-quarters of its value, the purchasing power of gold actually rose. As documented by Professor Roy W. Jastrom in his book The Golden Constant, gold has maintained its purchasing power, with minor fluctuations, for as far back as reliable price records are available, to 1560 in the case of England.

当军事需求不紧急时，与黄金挂钩的国家货币也保持了其购买力。在相对和平的十九世纪，尽管英镑与黄金的联系很弱，但英镑的价值却上涨了，而不是下跌了。信息时代的新超级政治条件使强联系成为可能，而不是像金本位那样的弱联系，而且消费者手中大大改进的信息和计算资源首次增强了这种联系。

National currencies linked to gold have also maintained their purchasing power when military exigencies were not pressing. The value of the British pound sterling rose, rather than fell, during the relatively peaceful nineteenth century even though it was only weakly linked to gold. The new mega-political conditions of the Information Age make feasible not a weak link, like the gold standard, but a strong link, reinforced for the first time by vastly improved information and computational resources in the hands of consumers.

如果他们未能达到预期，整个业务就会迅速消失（任何政府机构都肯定会滥用机会操纵原材料价格！），这种威胁将比任何针对政府垄断的措施提供更强有力的保障^。19

—弗里德里希·冯·哈耶克

The threat of the speedy loss of their whole business if they failed to meet expectations (and how any government organization would be certain to abuse the opportunity to play with raw material prices!) would provide a much stronger safeguard than any that could be devised against a government monopoly.¹⁹

—FRIEDRICH A. VON HAYEK

货币私有化

Privatizing Money

弗里德里希·冯·哈耶克于 1976 年提出，使用竞争性私人货币将消除通货膨胀。20^哈耶克认为，如果没有法定货币要求强制某个司法管辖区接受通货膨胀的货币，市场竞争将迫使货币的私人发行者维护其交换媒介的价值。任何未能维持其价值的私人货币发行者很快就会失去客户。加密网络现金的发展将生动地体现哈耶克的逻辑。

Friedrich von Hayek argued in 1976 that the use of competitive, private currencies would eradicate inflation.²⁰ Without legal-tender requirements forcing acceptance of an inflating currency within a jurisdiction, Hayek argued, market competition would force the private issuers of currency to preserve the value of their exchange media. Any issuer of a private currency failing to maintain its value would soon lose its customers. The evolution of encrypted cybercash will bring Hayek’s logic vividly to life.

所谓的“自由银行”理论并非仅仅是一个假设性的学术推测。苏格兰流通的私人竞争货币从十八世纪初到 1844 年，苏格兰一直实行自由银行制度。在那段时期，苏格兰没有中央银行。进入银行业几乎没有任何监管或限制。私人银行吸收存款并发行以金条为后盾的私人货币。劳伦斯·怀特教授记录道，这个制度运行良好。与同一时期英格兰采用的监管更严格、政治化的银行和货币制度相比，它更加稳定，通货膨胀率更低。21 英国^《金融时报》的迈克尔·普劳斯总结了苏格兰的自由银行经验：“几乎没有欺诈行为。没有证据表明过度发行纸币。银行通常不会持有过多或不足的储备。银行挤兑很少发生，也不会传染。自由银行赢得了公民的尊重，并为经济增长奠定了坚实的基础，经济增长在大部分时期都超过了英格兰。” ²²

The theory of “free banking,” as it is called, is not merely a hypothetical academic speculation. Private competing currencies circulated in Scotland from early in the eighteenth century until 1844. During that period, Scotland had no central bank. There were few regulations or restrictions on entry into the banking business. Private banks took deposits and issued their own private currencies backed by gold bullion. As Professor Lawrence White has documented, this system worked well. It was more stable, with less inflation than the more heavily regulated and politicized system of banking and money employed in England during the same period.²¹ Michael Prowse of the Financial Times summarized Scotland’s free-banking experience: “There was little fraud. There was no evidence of over-issue of notes. Banks did not typically hold either excessive or inadequate reserves. Bank runs were rare and not contagious. The free banks commanded the respect of citizens and provided a sound foundation for economic growth that outpaced that in England for most of the period.”²²

在十八、十九世纪的技术条件下行之有效的方法在二十一世纪的技术条件下将发挥更好的作用。你很快就能用私人公司发行的数字货币进行交易，就像美国运通发行旅行支票作为现金收据一样。一家比任何政府都更有声誉的机构，例如一家领先的矿业公司或瑞士银行公司，可以为一定数量的黄金甚至独特的金条创建加密收据，这些收据可以通过分子签名识别，甚至可能刻上全息图。这些收据将作为货币进行交易，几乎不可能被伪造或夸大。

What worked well under the technological conditions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries will work even better with twenty-first-century technology. You will soon be able to deal in digital money from a private firm, issued much as American Express issues traveler’s checks as receipts for cash. An institution of greater repute than any government, such as a leading mining company or the Swiss Bank Corporation, could create encrypted receipts for quantities of gold or even for unique bars, identified by molecular signatures and possibly even inscribed with holograms. These receipts will then trade as money, with almost no possibility that they can be counterfeited or inflated.

新的数字黄金将克服过去阻碍黄金直接用作货币的许多实际问题。处理大量黄金将不再不方便、麻烦或危险。数字收据不会太重而无法携带。事实上，它们唯一的物理存在将是复杂的计算机代码模式。将数字收据分成足够小的单位以支付微值购买也不困难。一块小到可以支付一枚 chiclet 的实物黄金很快就会丢失或与一块小到可以支付两枚 chiclet 的黄金混淆。但计算机可以很容易地区分这些数字货币的妖魔化，就像区分花栗鼠和犀牛的大小一样。

The new digital gold will overcome many of the practical problems that inhibited direct use of gold as money in the past. It will no longer be inconvenient, cumbersome, or dangerous to deal in large sums of gold. Digital receipts will not be too heavy to carry. Indeed, their only physical existence will be as elaborate patterns of computer code. Nor will it be difficult to divide digital receipts into units small enough to pay for even microvalue purchases. A wafer of physical gold tiny enough to pay for a chiclet would soon be lost or confused with one tiny enough to pay for two chiclets. But it will be as easy for the computer to distinguish these demoninations of digital money as if they were the size of a chipmunk and a rhinoceros.

数字货币提供小额支付的能力将促进此前不可能存在的新型企业的出现，这些企业专门组织低价值信息的分发。这些信息的供应商现在将通过直接借记版税计划获得补偿，从而克服了以前令人望而生畏的交易成本。当计费成本超过交易价值时，交易可能不会发生。使用电子货币可以实现非常低成本的同步计费，即账户在使用时扣款。我们在上文中引用了这样的例子想象一下，您可能会向比尔盖茨或拥有卢浮宫虚拟现实游览权的人支付相当于三分之一美分的版税。以一千种方式乘以这个数字。虚拟现实将创造几乎无限的许可机会，但只需支付微额版税。有一天，您将能够重播 1969 年世界职业棒球大赛的第三场比赛，并向那些使用其图像使您的虚拟现实看起来真实的球员支付微额版税。

The capacity of digital money to deliver micropayments will facilitate the emergence of new types of businesses that heretofore could not have existed, specializing in organizing the distribution of low-value information. The vendors of this information will now be compensated through direct-debit royalty schemes that overcome previously daunting transaction costs. When the cost of billing exceeds the value of a transaction, it probably will not take place. Use of cybermoney facilitates very-low-cost simultaneous billing, in which accounts are debited with use. We cited such an example above in imagining that you might pay a royalty equivalent to one-third of a penny to Bill Gates, or whoever owns the virtual-reality rights to tour the Louvre. Multiply this in a thousand ways. Virtual reality will create almost unlimited licensing opportunities that will nevertheless command only microroyalty payments. One day you will be able to replay the third game of the 1969 World Series, and pay microroyalties to the players whose images are used to make your virtual reality seem real.

消除通货膨胀​​

ERADICATING INFLATION

尽管存在这些可能性，但新数字货币最重要的后果肯定是通货膨胀的终结和金融体系的去杠杆化。其经济影响是深远的。正如我们在《街头血案》和《大清算》中所说， 20 世纪通货膨胀的上升与世界力量平衡密切相关。暴力回报的增加导致军事支出大幅增加，这反过来又需要更积极地努力没收财富。各国政府发现，他们可以有效地对所有持有本国货币余额的人征收年度财富税。这种对货币持有者的年度财富税也可以看作是一种交易费，允许货币使用者以发行者提供的方便形式保留他们的财富^。

Such possibilities notwithstanding, surely the most momentous consequence of the new digital money will be the end of inflation and the deleverage of the financial system. The economic implications are profound. The rise of inflation in the twentieth century, as we argued in Blood in the Streets and The Great Reckoning, was intimately connected with the balance of power in the world. Increasing returns to violence dictated sharply higher military expenditures, which in turn required ever more aggressive efforts to expropriate wealth. Governments found that they could effectively impose an annual wealth tax on all who held balances in their national currencies. This annual wealth tax on currency holders could also be seen as a transaction fee for allowing the users of currency to maintain their wealth in a convenient form provided by the issuers.^I

把通货膨胀看作是持有货币的便利性而产生的交易费可能有些不寻常，但请仔细考虑一下。在工业时代，我们习惯于将货币的提供视为一种无需直接支付的服务，因此很容易忘记美元、比索、英镑和法郎的发行者，即政府，确实需要我们支付，而且是通过通货膨胀支付的，而且支付得非常高。在过去的半个世纪里，这种通货膨胀交易费的费率从德国马克每年 2.7% 的低点变化到接近 100% 的危险费率。例如，在 1960 年至 1991 年期间，当梅内姆总统启动阿根廷货币局改革时，通货膨胀连续使阿根廷货币的 17 个版本减少了 0。如果 1960 年将世界上所有的财富都兑换成阿根廷比索并埋起来，那么到 1991 年再把它们挖出来就不值得了。

Thinking of inflation as a transaction fee for the convenience of holding currency may be unusual, but consider it closely. During the Industrial Age we became so accustomed to thinking of the provision of currency as a service for which one does not pay directly, that it was easy to forget that the issuers of the dollars, pesos, pounds, and francs, namely governments, did require that we pay, and pay dearly—through inflation. The rate of this inflationary transaction fee on currency varied during the last half century from a low of 2.7 percent annually for the German mark, to rates perilously close to 100 percent. For example, between 1960 and 1991, when President Menem launched Argentina’s currency-board reform, inflation struck seventeen zeros off successive versions of Argentine currency. If all the wealth of the world had been converted into Argentine pesos in 1960 and buried, it would not have been worth the effort to spade it up by 1991.

阿根廷的例子是下一个千年的领先指标。货币不会膨胀，因为其他国家将不再能够像阿根廷一样侥幸逃脱。不同之处在于，分散在网络上的私人货币将比阿根廷的自动货币局系统更不容易受到政策逆转的影响，自动货币局系统可能会因从其他国家输入的信贷紧缩而受损。私人货币不会因竞争性市场压力而膨胀。

Argentina’s example is a leading indicator for the next millennium. Currency will not be inflated because other nation-states will no longer be able to get away with it just as Argentina no longer can. The difference will be that private money dispersed over the Net will be even less susceptible to a reversal in policy than Argentina’s automatic currency-board system, which could be damaged by a credit contraction imported from other countries. Private money will not be inflatable because of competitive market pressures.

通货膨胀的消失将带走通货膨胀以前给那些垄断货币发行者带来的隐性利润。如果所有发行货币的隐性利润都被消除，就需要一种新的支付方式来直接补偿货币发行者。因此，使用新的货币体系可能会涉及更明确的交易成本，也许是每年 1% 左右的费用。与民族国家施加的每年 2.7% 至 99% 的通货膨胀惩罚相比，这将是一个很小的代价。更重要的是，随着垄断的削弱和全球竞争的加剧，未来总体价格很可能会下降。

The death of inflation will take away the disguised profits that inflation previously conveyed to those who were the monopolistic issuers of currency. If all the disguised profits of issuing money were extinguished, a new method of payment would be needed to compensate the issuers of currency directly. Use of the new monetary system will therefore probably involve a more explicit transaction cost, perhaps a fee on the order of 1 percent per annum. This will be a small price to pay compared to the annual inflationary penalty of from 2.7 percent to 99 percent imposed by nation-states. All the more so, because there is a likelihood that overall prices will decline in the future as monopolies are eroded and competition intensifies worldwide.

契约杠杆

Contracting Leverage

数字货币的出现不仅将一劳永逸地战胜通货膨胀，还将降低全球银行系统的杠杆率。世界各地的人们能够绕过监管机构，直接通过互联网转移资金，这是市场全球化前所未有的结果。这将超出任何政府的监管能力。当政府不再能通过印钞来贬值货币或通过受控制的银行系统随意扩大信贷来欺骗储户时，它们将失去大部分间接占用资源的能力。

The emergence of digital money will not only defeat inflation once and for all; it will also contract leverage in the banking systems of the world. The ability of people everywhere to bypass regulatory authorities and shift their funds directly through the Internet is an entirely unprecedented consequence of the globalization of markets. It will be beyond the power of any government to regulate. When governments can no longer depreciate currency by printing money or defraud savers by expanding credit at will through captive banking systems, they will lose a major part of their indirect capacity to commandeer resources.

更高的利率

Higher Interest Rates

这对大多数西方政府来说显然是一个两难境地。他们将面临税收收入的大幅下降和货币体系杠杆率的几乎消失。与此同时，他们仍将保留工业时代遗留下来的未偿债务和过高的社会支出预期。其结果将是一场严重的财政危机，以及许多令人不快的社会副作用，我们将在后面的章节中讨论这些副作用。这场转型危机的经济后果可能包括实际利率的一次性飙升。随着旧体系下签订的长期债务被清算，优惠信贷枯竭，债务人将受到挤压。

This will create an obvious dilemma for most Western governments. They will face sharp drops in revenue from taxation and the virtual elimination of leverage in the monetary system. At the same time, they will retain the unfunded liabilities and inflated expectations for social spending inherited from the industrial era. The result to be expected is an intense fiscal crisis with many unpleasant social side effects that we will consider in later chapters. The economic consequence of this transition crisis will probably include a one-time spike in real interest rates. Debtors will be squeezed as long-term liabilities contracted under the old system are liquidated, and concessionary credits dry up.

竞争导致的改变

Altered by Competition

面临货币垄断激烈竞争的政府可能会试图通过收紧信贷来压低收费网络货币的价格并为储蓄者提供更高的国家货币现金余额实际收益率。一些政府甚至可能寻求将黄金重新货币化，作为应对私人货币竞争的另一种权宜之计。他们可能会认为，与允许本国货币完全被商业网络货币取代相比，他们可以从松散控制的十九世纪金本位中获得更高的铸币税利润。但并非所有政府都会以同样的方式做出反应。在网络经济的早期阶段，计算机使用率和网络参与度较低的地区可能会选择老式的恶性通货膨胀。这不会使这些政府夺取富人的现金余额，但会从那些财富很少或无法进入网络经济的人那里榨取资源。使用此类策略的政府可能会以网络货币的形式进行国际借贷。

Governments facing serious competition to their currency monopolies will probably seek to underprice the for-fee cybercurrencies by tightening credits and offering savers higher real yields on cash balances in national currencies. Some governments may even seek to remonetize gold as another expedient to meet competition from private currencies. They may well reason that they could gain higher seigniorage profits from a loosely controlled nineteenth-century gold standard than would be the case if they allowed their national currency to be displaced entirely by commercial cybermoney. But not all governments will respond in the same way. Those in regions where computer usage and Net participation are low may opt for old-fashioned hyperinflation in the early stages of the cybereconomy. This will not enable these governments to capture the cash balances of the rich, but it will wring resources from those with little wealth or access to the cybereconomy. Governments using such tactics might nonetheless borrow internationally in cybermoney.

还有一些政府可能会适应信息经济创造的机会，促进本地电子货币交易。那些率先承认数字签名有效性、并允许地方法院强制收回不支付电子债务的司法管辖区将从长期资本贷款的激增中受益。显然，在地方法院施加惩罚或允许债务人无追索权违约的地区，电子货币将无法用于长期信贷。

Still other governments may adapt to the opportunities created by the information economy, and facilitate local transactions in cybermoney. Those jurisdictions that first recognize the validity of digital signatures and provide local court enforcement of repossession for nonpayment of cyberdebts will stand to benefit from a disproportionate surge in long-term capital lending. Obviously, no cybermoney would be available for long-term credits in territories where local courts imposed penalties or permitted debtors to default without recourse.

收益率差距

Yield Gap

信贷危机、国家货币当局的竞争性调整以及早期对网络货币借贷的过渡障碍，这些因素的结合将导致信息经济早期阶段的收益差距。网络货币的利率将低于国家货币，而且可能还会产生显性交易成本。抵消持有数字货币余额的这些明显缺点的是，将加强对掠夺性税收和通货膨胀造成的损失的保护。由于网络货币可能与黄金挂钩，因此它还将受益于黄金的升值。无论哪种替代政府政策占主导地位，黄金价格相对于其他商品的价格都可能大幅上涨。

The combination of credit crises, competitive adjustments by national monetary authorities, and early transitional obstacles to lending cybercurrency will lead to a yield gap in the early stages of the information economy. Cybermoney will pay lower interest rates than national currencies and will probably also carry explicit transaction costs. Offsetting these apparent drawbacks to holding balances in digital money will be enhanced protection against losses due to predatory taxes and inflation. Because it will probably be gold-linked, cybermoney will also benefit from the appreciation of gold. The price of gold will probably rise significantly relative to other commodities, no matter which of the alternative government policies predominates.

为什么？

Why?

在通货紧缩时期，黄金的实际价格几乎总是上涨。毕竟，通货紧缩反映了流动性的短缺。黄金是流动性的终极形式。

The real price of gold almost always rises in deflation. A deflation, after all, reflects a shortage of liquidity. Gold is the ultimate form of liquidity.

工业时代的通货紧缩

The Deflation of the Industrial Age

总体而言，更高的实际利率将刺激高成本、低生产率活动的清算，并暂时减少消费。我们在《街头血案》和《大清算》中探讨了信贷周期的逻辑及其解体，因此我们不会在这里重复这些论点。可以说，通货紧缩环境可能会持续一段时间，对北美和西欧等高成本工业经济体的影响将比对亚洲和拉丁美洲等低成本经济体的影响更为不利。

Higher real rates all around will spur liquidation of high-cost, unproductive activities, and temporarily reduce consumption. We explored the logic of the credit cycle and its unwinding in Blood in the Streets and The Great Reckoning, so we will not rehearse those arguments here. Suffice it to say that the deflationary environment may drag on for some time, with more adverse consequences in the high-cost industrial economies of North America and Western Europe than in the low-cost economies in Asia and Latin America.

长期降低利率

Lower Rates Long-Term

虽然网络经济出现的早期后果可能包括利率上升，但长期后果却恰恰相反。随着资源摆脱政府的掌控，储蓄者的税后回报将大幅增加。资源利用效率的大幅提高，以及资本在全球范围内寻求最高回报的解放，应该能够迅速弥补转型危机初期的产出损失。

While the early consequences of the emergence of the cybereconomy are likely to include higher interest rates, the longer-term consequence will be just the opposite. The after-tax returns to savers will sharply increase as resources escape the grasp of governments. Dramatic improvements in the efficiency of resource use, and the liberation of capital to find the highest returns globally, should rapidly compensate for the output lost early in the transition crisis.

投资者对资本的控制

Investor Control over Capital

传统思想家在此时回顾我们的论点时会得出这样的结论：主要民族国家的收入再分配崩溃将导致世界经济崩溃。不要相信。我们并不否认可能会出现转型危机。但认为国家通过大规模重新分配资源来改善经济运作的观点是不合时宜的，这种信条大致相当于中世纪末期普遍存在的迷信，即禁食和鞭笞对社会有益。不应忘记，政府大规模浪费资源。浪费资源使人贫穷。当历史上由政府独占的收入转而由真正有才华的人控制时，资源利用效率将大幅提高。

Conventional thinkers reviewing our argument at this point would conclude that the breakdown of income redistribution in the leading nation-states would doom the world to economic collapse. Do not believe it. We do not gainsay the fact that a transition crisis would be likely. But the view that the state improves the functioning of the economy by massive reallocation of resources is an anachronism, an article of faith roughly equivalent to the widespread superstitions at the close of the Middle Ages that fasting and flagellation were beneficial for a community. It should not be forgotten that governments waste resources on a large scale. Wasting resources makes you poor. A dramatic improvement in the efficiency of resource use will arise when revenues historically engrossed by governments come to be controlled instead by persons of genuine talent.

数百亿美元，最终数千亿美元将由数十万，甚至数百万主权个人控制。这些新的世界财富管理者很可能比政客更有能力利用资源和部署投资。历史上第一次，超级政治条件将允许最有能力的投资者和企业家而不是暴力专家最终控制资本。可以合理地预期，这种分散的、市场驱动的投资的回报率可能是民族国家时代政治驱动的预算分配微薄回报的两倍或三倍。在二十世纪最后几十年，在任何国家，政府投资大幅为负的例子并不罕见。我们引用了1992 年 11 月《大清算》修订版中的俄罗斯官方统计数据，表明整个俄罗斯经济“价值仅为 300 亿美元，不到其原材料投入价值的三分之一。这意味着，俄罗斯经济的产出将超过如果国内制造业和服务业完全停摆，其价值将增加三倍。他们不但没有贡献价值，反而减去了价值。” ²³

Tens of billions, then ultimately hundreds of billions of dollars will be controlled by hundreds of thousands, then millions of Sovereign Individuals. These new stewards of the world’s wealth are likely to prove far abler than politicians in utilizing resources and deploying investment. For the first time in history, megapolitical conditions will allow the ablest investors and entrepreneurs rather than specialists in violence ultimate control over capital. It is not unreasonable to expect that the rates of return on this dispersed, market-driven investment could be double or triple the meager returns from the politically driven budget allocations of the nation-state era. It was not uncommon in the final decades of the twentieth century to find examples in any country of government investment that were substantially negative. We cited official Russian statistics in the revised version of The Great Reckoning from November 1992, suggesting that the whole of Russia’s economy was “worth just $30 billion, less than a third of the value of its raw-material inputs. By implication, the output of Russia’s economy would more than triple in value if the domestic manufacturing and service economy were shut down completely. Instead of contributing value, they subtract it.”²³

无可否认，共产主义垮台后的俄罗斯是一个极端的例子，但有充分的证据表明，减少国家对资源的控制往往会提高经济效率。《经济学人》引用的增长率表明，经济自由与经济增长密切相关，最自由的国家的增长率最快。信息时代的网络经济将比历史上任何其他商业领域都更加自由。因此，有理由预期，网络经济将迅速成为新千年最重要的新经济。它的成功将吸引来自世界各地的新参与者，就像传真机的广泛使用使非传真用户越来越喜欢传真一样。但更重要的是，摆脱掠夺性暴力将使网络经济的复合增长率远远高于由民族国家主导的传统经济体。

Admittedly, the example of Russia after the collapse of Communism is an extreme one, but there is ample evidence that reducing state control of resources tends to improve economic efficiency. Growth rates cited by the Economist suggest that economic liberty is strongly correlated with economic growth, with the most rapid rates of growth in the freest countries. The cybereconomy of the Information Age will be more free than any other commercial realm in history. It is therefore reasonable to expect that the cybereconomy will rapidly become the most important new economy of the new millennium. Its success will attract new participants from everywhere on the globe, in the same way that the wide use of fax machines made telecopying increasingly attractive for nonusers. But even more important, freedom from predatory violence will allow the cybereconomy to grow at far higher compound rates of growth than conventional economies dominated by nation-states.

这也许是预测垄断税可能崩溃和政府能力膨胀对经济的影响时最重要的一点。撇开可能持续数十年的转型困难不谈，全球经济的长期前景应该非常乐观。只要环境允许人们减少保护成本并尽量减少对控制有组织暴力的人的贡品，经济通常就会大幅增长。正如莱恩所说：“我想说，在大多数增长时期，最重要的单一因素，如果说有什么因素是最重要的，那就是减少用于战争和警察的资源比例。” ²⁴

That is perhaps the most important point to be made in anticipating the economic impact of the likely collapse of monopoly taxing and inflating capacities of government. Setting aside transition difficulties, which could last for decades, the long-term prospects for the global economy should be highly bullish. Whenever circumstances allow people to reduce protection costs and minimize tribute paid to those who control organized violence, the economy usually grows dramatically. As Lane said, “I would like to suggest that the most weighty single factor in most periods of growth, if any one factor has been most important, has been a reduction in the proportion of resources devoted to war and police.”²⁴

减少用于掠夺和依靠掠夺而生存的资源可能会带来巨大的效率收益。如果保护定价建立在竞争的基础上，让当地垄断企业以价格和质量为基础争夺客户，那么就有可能获得巨大的效率收益。预期的结果是税率会大大降低，政治活动所耗费的资源和精力也会减少，而政治活动将不再带来之前巨大的红利。

There could be great efficiency gains arising from a reduction of the resources devoted to predation and living off the spoils of predation. If the pricing of protection were placed on a competitive basis, with local monopolies competing for customers on a basis of price and quality, potentially huge gains to efficiency would be possible. The result to be expected would be much lower rates of taxation and less loss of resources and effort in political activity, which would no longer pay its previously huge dividends.

选民们会愿意放弃他们已经习以为常的政治横财吗？这是我们在其他地方详细讨论过的一个问题。但简单的答案是，我们可能别无选择。现在没有人会抗议阴雨天气或干旱，无论它们对经济有多大的破坏或令人不快。没有人，无论有犯罪倾向，会向穷人索要巨额赎金，否则将处以死刑。如果政客们无法获得资源进行重新分配，公众可能会以理性的方式做出反应，忘记政治，就像中世纪结束时，善意的人们不再组织忏悔游行一样。

Would voters willingly forgo political windfalls to which they have become accustomed? That is an issue we take up at length elsewhere. But a simple answer is that we may have no choice. No one now demonstrates against rainy weather, or draught, however economically damaging or unpleasant it may be. No one, however criminally inclined, holds a pauper to ransom demanding a huge payment on pain of death. If it becomes impossible for politicians to obtain resources to redistribute, the public may respond in a rational way and forget about politics, just as well-intentioned people ceased organizing marches of penitents when the Middle Ages came to an end.

一、通货膨胀在工业化时期还有另一个诱因，因为那时物价和工资都处于向下的僵化状态。适度的通货膨胀通过降低实际工资和物价来增加产出。

I. Inflation had another lure during the industrial period when prices and wages were downwardly inflexible. Modest inflation increased output by reducing real wages and prices.

第八章平等主义经济的终结 无工作世界中的收入能力革命

CHAPTER 8 THE END OF EGALITARIAN ECONOMICS The Revolution in Earnings Capacity in a World Without Jobs

“上帝是不能被嘲笑的；因为无论一个人种什么，他也将收获什么。”

—加拉太书6:7

“God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.”

—GALATIANS 6:7

生产或防御的主导形式的巨大变化改变了社会结构，改变了不同群体的财富和权力比例。信息时代不仅仅意味着功能强大的计算机的使用日益增多，它还意味着生活方式、制度和资源分配的革命。由于隐蔽暴力在控制资源方面的作用将大大减弱，因此将出现一种新的财富结构，而不再有政府在二十世纪的强制性调解。由于位置在信息社会中的重要性大大降低，因此未来所有在地理边界内而不是地理边界外运作的组织的作用都将减弱。政客、工会、受监管的行业、游说者和政府本身将变得不那么重要。因为从政府手中夺取的贸易优惠和限制政府的价值将会降低，用于促进或抵制游说的资源将会减少。

Great changes in the dominant forms of production or defense change the structure of society, and the proportion of wealth and power of different groups. The Information Age means more than just a growing use of powerful computers. It means a revolution in lifestyles, institutions, and the distribution of resources. Because the role of covert violence in controlling resources will be sharply diminished, a new configuration of wealth will develop, without the coercive mediation by government that characterized the twentieth century. Because location will mean much less in the Information Society, there will be a diminished role in the future for all organizations that operate within rather than beyond geographic boundaries. Politicians, labor unions, regulated professions, lobbyists, and governments per se will be less important. Because favors and restraints of trade wrested from governments will be less valuable, fewer resources will be wasted either to promote or resist lobbying.

那些利用强制手段和地方优势来重新分配收入的人注定会失去大部分权力。这将改变资源的支配权。迄今为止一直被民族国家霸占的私人财富将由那些赚取这些财富的人保留。越来越多的财富将落入全世界最有能力的企业家和风险资本家手中。全球化以及信息经济的其他特征将倾向于增加每个领域最有才华的人的收入。由于最出色的表现所产生的边际价值将如此巨大，因此整个全球经济的收入能力分配将与现在体育和歌剧等表演行业的情况大致相同。

Those who have employed compulsion and local advantage to redistribute income are destined to lose much of their power. This will alter the command of resources. Privately generated wealth that heretofore has been commandeered by the nation-state will be retained instead by those who earn it. Increasing amounts of wealth will find their way into the hands of the ablest entrepreneurs and venture capitalists worldwide. Globalization, along with other characteristics of the information economy, will tend to increase the income earned by the most talented individuals in each field. Because the marginal value generated by superlative performance will be so huge, the distribution of earnings capacity throughout the entire global economy will take much the shape it does now in the performance professions like athletics and opera.

AM幅度超越帕累托定律​​​

A MAGNITUDE BEYOND PARETO’S LAW

帕累托定律说，80% 的收益将取决于或归属于 20% 的从业者。这可能大致正确，但更令人震惊的是，美国 1% 的人口支付了 28.7% 的所得税，这表明随着社会进入信息时代，他们将经历比维尔弗雷多·帕累托在上个世纪末观察到的更加不平衡的收入和能力分配。人们已经习惯了巨大的财富不平等。1828 年，人们认为 4% 的纽约人拥有全市 62% 的财富。到 1845 年，最富有的 4% 拥有纽约市所有企业和非企业财富的约 81%。更广泛地说，1860 年，美国最富有的 10% 人口拥有全美约 40% 的财富。到 1890 年，记录显示，当时最富有的 12% 人口拥有美国约 86% 的财富^。1

Pareto’s law says that 80 percent of the benefit will depend on or go to 20 percent of those engaged. This may be approximately true, though, more strikingly, 1 percent of the population of the United States pays 28.7 percent of the income tax, suggesting that as societies advance into the Information Age they will experience an even more skewed distribution of incomes and abilities than Vilfredo Pareto observed at the end of the last century. People are quite accustomed to substantial inequalities of wealth. In 1828, 4 percent of New Yorkers were thought to have owned 62 percent of all the city’s wealth. By 1845, the top 4 percent owned about 81 percent of all corporate and noncorporate wealth in New York City. More broadly, the top 10 percent of the population owned about 40 percent of the wealth across the whole United States in 1860. By 1890, records suggest that the richest 12 percent then owned about 86 percent of America’s wealth.¹

1890 年的数据接近帕累托的设想。它们与帕累托的 80-20% 比率不同，主要是因为 19 世纪末大量身无分文的移民涌入美国。移民在总财富中所占份额微不足道；因此，他们的到来自然而然地使财富总量更加不平等。事实上，这是一个引人注目的例证，即任何真正的机会激增几乎不可避免地会导致至少短暂的不平等激增。到 1890 年，移民占美国总人口的 15% 左右，但在一些东北部州，这一比例超过 40%，而这些州是收入和财富的主要来源。2^调整移民激增后，19 世纪末的美国符合帕累托的公式与他所居住的十九世纪末的瑞士一样。

The 1890 numbers are close to what Pareto had in mind. They vary from his ratio of 80-20 percent mainly because a huge influx of penniless immigrants arrived in America at the end of the nineteenth century. The immigrants’ share of total wealth was negligible; therefore, their arrival automatically made the total holdings of wealth more unequal. In fact, this is a striking illustration of the fact that any genuine upsurge in opportunity is almost inevitably bound to lead to at least a brief surge in inequality. By 1890, immigrants accounted for about 15 percent of the total U.S. population, but more than 40 percent in some of the northeastern states, where much of the income and wealth were generated.² Adjusting for the surge in immigration, late-nineteenth-century America fit Pareto’s formula about as well as late-nineteenth-century Switzerland, where he lived.

信息时代已经改变了财富分配，尤其是在美国，这也是现代美国政治苦涩的原因之一，我们将在下一章进一步探讨这个问题。信息时代要求经济成功人士具备相当高的读写和算术水平。美国教育部一项大规模调查“美国成人识字率”显示，多达 9000 万 15 岁以上的美国人能力极差。或者用美国侨民比尔·布莱森更生动的描述来说，“他们愚蠢得像猪一样”。3^具体来说，9000 万美国成年人被判定无法写信、看不懂公交车时刻表、无法加减运算，甚至无法使用计算器。那些看不懂普通公交车时刻表的人不太可能在信息高速公路上获得很大帮助。从这三分之一尚未准备好加入电子信息世界的美国人中，一个愤怒的下层阶级正在被招募。处在社会顶层的是一小部分人，大概占5%，他们是受过高等教育的信息工作者或资本所有者，他们相当于信息时代的封建时代的土地贵族，关键的区别在于，信息时代的精英是生产专家，而不是暴力专家。

The Information Age has already changed the distribution of wealth, particularly in the United States, and is one of the reasons for the bitterness of modern American politics, which we explore further in the next chapter. The Information Age requires a quite high standard of literacy and numeracy for economic success. A massive U.S. Education Department survey, “Adult Literacy in America,” has shown that as many as 90 million Americans over the age of fifteen are woefully incompetent. Or in the more colorful characterization of American expatriate Bill Bryson, “They are as stupid as pig dribble.”³ Specifically, 90 million American adults were judged incapable of writing a letter, fathoming a bus schedule, or adding and subtracting, even with the help of a calculator. Those who cannot make sense of an ordinary bus timetable are unlikely to be able to make much of the Information Superhighway. From this third of Americans who have not prepared themselves to join the electronic information world, an angry underclass is being recruited. At the top of society is a small group, perhaps 5 percent, of highly educated information workers or capital owners who are the Information Age equivalent of the landed aristocracy of the feudal age—with the crucial difference that the elite of the Information Age are specialists in production, not specialists in violence.

创新的大政治

The Megapolitics of Innovation

大多数二十世纪的社会学家毫无理由地认为，技术进步自然会产生越来越平等的社会。但在 1750 年左右之前，情况并非如此。从那时开始，创新的新型工业技术开始为非熟练工人创造就业机会，并扩大企业规模。工厂的新技术不仅提高了穷人的实际收入，而穷人无需付出任何努力；它还倾向于增强政治体系的权力，使其更有能力重新分配收入，更有能力抵御动乱。从长远来看，没有内在理由认为技术总是倾向于掩盖而不是强调人类才能和动机的差异。有些技术相对平等，需要许多独立工人做出大致相等的贡献；另一些技术将权力或财富交到少数主人手中，而大多数人只不过是农奴。历史和技术都以不同的方式塑造了不同的国家。工厂时代产生了一种形态，信息时代正在产生另一种形态，这种形态不那么暴力，因而比它所取代的形态更加精英化，更加不平等。

For no very good reason, most twentieth-century sociologists have assumed that technological progress would naturally tend to produce increasingly egalitarian societies. This was not true prior to about 1750. Beginning around that time, innovative new industrial technology began to open job opportunities for the unskilled and increase the scale of enterprise. The new technology of the factory not only raised the real earnings of the poor without any effort on their part; it also tended to increase the power of political systems, making them more able to redistribute income as well as more capable of withstanding unrest. Taking a longer view, there is no inherent reason to suppose that technology always tends to mask rather than accentuate the differences in human talents and motivation. Some technologies have been relatively egalitarian, requiring contributions of many independent workers of approximately equal utility; others have put power or wealth into the hands of a few masters while most people were little more than serfs. Both history and technology have shaped different nations in different ways. The Factory Age produced one shape, and the Information Age is producing another, less violent, and therefore more elitist and less egalitarian than the one it is replacing.

阿蒙的T乌贼

AMMON’S TURNIP

十九世纪末，一些经济学家开始发展数理经济学，其中最著名的是英国经济学家威廉·斯坦利·杰文斯。最早将概率论应用于重大社会问题的经济学家之一是德国经济学家奥托·阿蒙，他的著作于 1899 年由卡洛斯·C·克洛森首次翻译成英文，发表在《政治经济学杂志》的一篇文章中。这篇文章的标题是“概率学说的一些社会应用”。4^人们可能会认为，这样的文章现在纯粹是出于古物研究的兴趣。事实上，它处理了一个再次浮出水面的经济问题，并且以一种仍然令人振奋的方式处理了这个问题。

In the late nineteenth century a number of economists, of whom William Stanley Jevons was the most distinguished in England, started to develop mathematical economics. One of the first to apply probability theory to a major social question was the German economist Otto Ammon, whose work was first translated into English by Carlos C. Closson in an article in the Journal of Political Economy in 1899. The article was entitled “Some Social Applications of the Doctrine of Probability.”⁴ One might suppose that such an article was now of purely antiquarian interest. In fact, it deals with an economic problem that is again coming to the fore, and deals with it in what is still a stimulating way.

奥托·阿蒙对社会能力的分布及其与收入和地位分布的关系很感兴趣。他以四个骰子（每个骰子有六面）总分出现的可能性作为出发点。在 1,296 次可能的投掷中，某些总分出现的频率会比其他总分高得多。

Otto Ammon was interested in the distribution of ability in society, and its relationship to the distribution of income and status. He took as his starting point the probable occurrence of total scores from four dice, each with six sides. Out of 1,296 possible throws, some totals will occur much more often than others.

显而易见，高分和低分都比较少见。总分可能有两种，但前四名在 1,296 个分数中只出现了 35 次，后四名也只出现了 35 次。中间七组分数预计会出现 884 次；中间三分之一的可能得分是所有投掷中超过三分之二的结果。这产生了概率论中的中心聚集特征。

It is immediately apparent that high and low scores are both comparatively rare. There are two possible totals, but the top four of these only occur thirty-five times out of the 1,296, and the bottom four only occur thirty-five times. The middle seven group of scores can be expected to occur 884 times; the middle third of possible scores is the result in more than two-thirds of all throws. This produces the characteristic crowding toward the center of probability theory.

奥托·阿蒙认为，掷骰子的随机分布与人类能力的分布相匹配。他在智力测试和智商发展之前写作，并依靠弗朗西斯·高尔顿早期关于智力的研究。阿蒙并不认为社会效用或人生成功仅仅取决于智力。他列出了“三组心理特征，它们在很大程度上决定了一个人在生活中的地位。”它们是：

Otto Ammon argued that this random distribution of throws of the dice was matched by the distribution of human abilities. He was writing before the development of intelligence testing and IQs, and relied on the earlier work on intelligence of Francis Galton. Ammon did not consider that social utility, or success in life, depended simply on intelligence. He listed “three groups of mental traits which are largely decisive in the place which a man will occupy in life.” These were:

1. 智力特质；我把所有属于人类理性方面的东西都包括在内——快速理解力、记忆力、判断力、发明力，以及任何属于这一领域的东西。

2. 道德品质；即自我控制、意志力、勤奋、毅力、节制、尊重家庭义务、诚实等。

3、 经济特质；如商业能力、组织才能、技术能力、谨慎、精明、深谋远虑、节俭等等。

1. Intellectual traits; among which I included all that belong to the rational side of man-power of quick comprehension, memory, power, of judgement, power of invention, and whatever also belongs to this field.

2. Moral traits; namely, self control, will power, industry, perseverance, moderation, regard for family obligations, honesty and the like.

3. Economic traits; such as business ability, organizing talent, technical skill, caution, clever calculation, foresight, thrift and so on.

对于这些心理特征，他补充道：

To these mental traits he added:

4. 身体特征：工作能力、耐力、承受劳累和抵抗各种刺激的能力、活力、善良、健康等。

4. Bodily traits; power to work, endurance, power of undergoing exertions and of resisting excitements of every kind, vigour, good, health, etc.

奥托·阿蒙认为，智力、性格、天赋和体格等品质的可能分布与骰子上的分数分布相似。他进一步指出，事实上，变量远不止四个，而且它们的变化程度超过六个。如果一个人不是掷四个骰子，而是掷八个，那么可能的掷骰子次数不少于 1,679,616 次，但最高分数 48 分仍然只会出现一次。在所有决定人生地位的因素中得分很高的男人或女人比掷出四个六点的概率要少得多；也许和掷出八个六点一样罕见。然而，阿蒙指出，这些人类品质的高分和低分混合可能会产生“天赋不平衡、不和谐的人，尽管他们有一些杰出的品质，但无法成功地应对生活的考验。”

In Otto Ammon’s view, the probable distribution of these qualities of intelligence, character, talent, and body were similar to those of scores on the dice. He went further and argued that there were, in fact, many more than four variables, and that they varied in more than six degrees. If instead of throwing four dice, one throws eight, then there are no less than 1,679,616 possible throws, yet the highest score, forty-eight, can still only be expected to occur once. The man or woman who scores very highly in all the factors that determine the place in life is much rarer than the probability of throwing four sixes would suggest; perhaps as rare as throwing eight sixes. Yet, Ammon notes, a mixture of high and low scores in these human qualities may produce “persons of unbalanced, inharmonious gifts, who, in spite of some brilliant qualities, cannot successfully meet the tests of life.”

“像一座孤独的山峰，或者更确切地说，像一座大教堂的尖顶，才华横溢的人和天才高高耸立在平庸的大众之上……无论如何，才华横溢的人的数量是如此之少，以至于不可能因为社会制度的不完善而将‘许多’这样的人留在下层阶级。”

—O TTO A MMON

“Like a lonely mountain peak, or rather, like the spire of a cathedral, rise the men of high talent and of genius above the broad mass of mediocrity.…The number of the highly gifted is at all events so small that it is impossible that ‘many’ such can have been kept back in lower classes through the incompleteness of social institutions.”

—OTTO AMMON

特征和收入

Traits and Incomes

阿蒙随后转向收入分配。当然，19 世纪 90 年代的统计数据远不如现在那么充分，但德国的官僚机构已经发展得很好，奥托·阿蒙发现萨克森、普鲁士、巴登和其他德国州的收入曲线与他认为的人类能力分布和掷骰子的概率相似。他在查尔斯·布思的《伦敦人民的生活和劳动》（1892 年）中也发现了类似的数字。事实上，布思的社会分布与人们从阿蒙的概率论中可以预料到的非常相似。布思发现，在伦敦，25% 的人生活贫困或更糟，51.5% 的人生活舒适，15% 的人生活富裕或更好；如果取布思分类中最低的两个类别，则为 9.5%。在二十世纪福利国家出现之前，人们通常将最不富裕的人称为“被淹没的十分之一”。⁵布斯商学院两个最高的类别占比达到 7%。

Ammon then turns to the distribution of incomes. Of course, the statistics of the 1890s were much less adequate than they would be now, but German bureaucracy was already well developed, and Otto Ammon found in Saxony, Prussia, Baden, and other German states income curves that he thought were similar, both to his perceived distribution of human ability and to the probabilities of the dice. He found similar figures in Charles Booth’s Life and Labour of the People of London (1892). Indeed, Booth’s social distribution does look much as one might expect from Ammon’s probability theory. Booth found in London 25 percent who were poor or worse, 51.5 percent who were comfortable, and 15 percent who were well-to-do, or better; if one takes the two lowest of Booth’s categories they come to 9.5 percent. It was common before the welfare states of the twentieth century to speak of those who were least well off as the “submerged tenth.”⁵ The two highest of Booth’s categories come to 7 percent.

奥托·阿蒙从这一切中得出了一些有趣的结论。他认为，人们的能力（广义上）决定了他们在社会中的地位和收入。他认为，能力高自然会导致人们的收入和社会地位上升。“就像一座孤独的山峰，或者更确切地说，就像大教堂的尖顶，才华横溢的人和天才高高耸立在广大的平庸之辈之上……”他还认为，“所谓社会金字塔的真实形态就像一个有点扁平的洋葱或萝卜。”这种萝卜的茎干上方很窄，根部下方也很窄。这种社会萝卜更适合用来比喻社会金字塔，因为就像现代工业社会一样，它的质量在中间，而金字塔的质量在底部。

From all this, Otto Ammon drew a number of interesting conclusions. He thought that people’s abilities, broadly defined, determined their place in society and their income. He believed that high abilities naturally result in people rising in income and social position. “Like a lonely mountain peak, or rather, like the spire of a cathedral, rise the men of high talent and of genius above the broad mass of mediocrity,…” He also believed that the “true form of the so-called social pyramid is that of a somewhat flat onion or turnip.” This turnip has a narrow stem above and a narrow root beneath. Such a social turnip is preferable as a metaphor to the social pyramid because, like modern industrial society, it has its mass in the middle while the pyramid has its mass at the bottom.

萝卜的形状

The Shape of the Turnip

现代工业社会确实都是萝卜青菜，上层是少数富人和高级专业人士，中产阶级人数较多，底层是少数穷人。相对于中产阶级，两个极端都很小。在现代伦敦，如果不是在华盛顿，百万富翁的数量肯定比无家可归者多。

Modern industrial societies are indeed all turnips, with a small wealthy and upper-professional class at the top, a larger middle class, and a minority poor class at the bottom. Relative to the middle, both the extremes are small. In modern London, if not in Washington, there are certainly more millionaires than homeless.

所有这些都很有趣，但 Ammon 作品的直接意义在于我们正在经历的上层和中层之间在经济和政治方面关系的重大长期转变。工厂时代（现在已经过去）所需的技能与信息时代所需的技能无疑不同。大多数人可以掌握操作 20 世纪中期机器所需的技能，但这些工作现在已经被智能机器取代，而智能机器实际上控制着整个低技能和中等技能就业领域已经消失。如果我们是对的，那么这是大多数就业岗位消失和现货市场工作重新配置的前奏。

All of this is intriguing, but the immediate interest of Ammon’s work lies in the major long-term shift we are experiencing in the relations, financial and political, between the top and the middle. The skills needed in the Factory Age, which is now passing, are undeniably different from those demanded by the Information Age. Most people could master the skills required for operating the machines of the mid-twentieth century, but those jobs have now been replaced by smart machines which, in effect, control themselves. A whole arena of low- and middle-skill employment has already disappeared. If we are correct, this is a prelude to the disappearance of most employment and the reconfiguration of work in the spot market.

“然而，官方悄悄承认的事实是，大多数失业年轻人根本没有任何资质……” ⁶

—C LIVE J ENKINS 和B ARRIE S HERMAN

“Yet it is a fact, acknowledged officially but quietly, that most of the unemployed youngsters have no qualifications whatsoever…”⁶

—CLIVE JENKINS AND BARRIE SHERMAN

更少的人将承担更多工作​​​​​

FEWER PEOPLE WILL DO MORE WORK

我们可以采用简单的四骰子分布来表示人类的能力，并假设人们在工厂时代可以得分 4 X 2 或更高。这意味着超过 95% 的人口都高于查尔斯·布斯所说的“积极社会效用的最低限度”。事实上，3% 被设定为 20 世纪 40 年代和 50 年代的充分就业标准。假设在信息时代，所需分数上升到 4 X 3，所需最低分数从 8 上升到 12。这意味着将近 24% 的人会低于这个“社会效用”的限度。

We can take the simple four-dice distribution of human ability and suppose that people could score in the Factory Age with a set of 4 X 2 or above. That would mean that over 95 percent of the population were above what Charles Booth called “the lowest limit of positive social usefulness.” Indeed, 3 percent was set as the full-employment standard of the 1940s and 1950s. Suppose that in the Information Age the required score has risen to a 4 X 3, and the required minimum has gone up from 8 to 12. That would mean that nearly 24 percent would fall below this limit of “social usefulness.”

类似的事情也会发生在最高端。在工厂时代，高能力的必要水平可能是 4×4；假设在信息时代，这一水平上升到 4×5。在这种情况下，有资格担任最高职位（也是薪水最高的职位）的人的比例将从 34% 下降到 5%。

Something similiar would happen at the top end of the scale. In the Factory Age, the required level of high ability was perhaps 4 X 4; suppose that in the Information Age it has risen to 4 X 5. In that case the proportion of people qualified for the top jobs, which are also the best paid, would fall from 34 percent to 5 percent.

这些数字纯属假设。显然，我们不知道技能要求将发生怎样的变化——或者已经发生了怎样的变化——但肯定有所增加。由于萝卜的形状，最低技能要求的适度增加将使大量人无法发挥重要的经济作用。同样，较高技能要求的适度增加将大大减少有资格从事较高工作岗位的人数。一些变化正在发生：我们还不知道变化会有多大。

These numbers are purely hypothetical. Obviously, we do not know what the shift in the skill requirements will be—or has already been—but there has certainly been a rise. Because of the shape of the turnip, a quite modest rise in the minimum skill requirement would put large numbers outside of a significant economic role. Equally, quite a small rise in the higher skill requirement would reduce the number of people qualified for the higher jobs very dramatically. Some shift is happening: we do not yet know how big it will be.

确实，有大量社会和政治证据表明，所有发达工业社会都在发生这种转变，而且其步伐正在加快，规模已十分庞大。对稀有技能的报酬已不断增加。传统思想家对此表示不满。例如，请考虑罗伯特·H·弗兰克和菲利普·J·库克所著的《赢者通吃社会》^。7该书记录了美国许多领域的最有才华的竞争者赚取高薪的趋势日益明显。同样，中等技能人才的机会也在减少；现在，大量低技能人才无法获得舒适的生活，尽管他们仍可能在小规模服务业中找到一席之地。

There is indeed no lack of social and political evidence that this shift is taking place in all advanced industrial societies, that its pace is accelerating, and that the movement is already a big one. The rewards for rare skills have increased and are increasing. This has been noted with displeasure by conventional thinkers. Consider, for example, The Winner-Take-All Society, by Robert H. Frank and Philip J. Cook.⁷ It documents the growing tendency for the most talented competitors in many fields in the United States to earn very high incomes. Equally, the opportunities for middle skills are falling; a substantial, number of low skills now fall outside the range that is rewarded with a comfortable living, though they may still find a place in small-scale services.

如果信息时代要求上层和下层都具备更高的技能，那么除了最富有的 5% 的人之外的每个人都会处于相对不利的地位，而最富有的 5% 的人将获得巨大的收益。他们不仅会赚取更高的收入份额，而且会保留更大份额的收入。与此同时，他们将比以往任何时候承担更多的世界工作。许多人将以主权个人的身份出现。在信息时代，收入分配的格局将更像 1750 年而不是 1950 年。

If the Information Age demands higher skills both at the top and bottom end, everyone except for the top 5 percent will be relatively at a disadvantage, but the top 5 percent will gain tremendously. They will both earn a higher share of income and keep a greater share of what they earn. At the same time, they will do a greater portion of the world’s work than ever before. Many will emerge as Sovereign Individuals. In the Information Age, the turnip of income distribution will look more as it did in 1750 than in 1950.

那些被灌输了期望低技能或中等技能的人实现收入平等和高消费水平的社会将面临动力不足和不安全感。随着更多国家的经济更加深入地吸收信息技术，它们将看到或多或少无法就业的底层阶级的出现——北美已经出现了这种现象。这正是正在发生的事情。这将导致一种带有民族主义、反技术偏见的反应，我们将在下一章中详细介绍。

Societies that have been indoctrinated to expect income equality and high levels of consumption for persons of low or modest skills will face demotivation and insecurity. As the economies of more countries more deeply assimilate information technology, they will see the emergence—so evident already in North America—of a more or less unemployable underclass. This is exactly what is happening. This will lead to a reaction with a nationalist, antitechnology bias, as we detail in the next chapter.

工厂时代可能是一个独特的时期，半愚蠢的机器为非熟练工人留下了一个高利润的市场。现在机器可以照顾自己了，信息时代正将其礼物倾注到奥托·阿蒙的萝卜的 5% 的顶端。信息时代已经为前 10% 的人，即所谓的认知精英，带来了更好的前景。然而，对于前 10% 中的前 10% 的人，即认知双顶，它将是最好的。在封建时代，需要一百名半熟练的农民来支持一名骑马的高技能军阀（或骑士）。信息经济中的主权个人将不是军阀，而是专业技能的大师，包括创业和投资。然而，封建的百比一比例似乎即将回归。无论好坏，二十一世纪的社会可能比我们二十世纪所生活的社会更加不平等。

The Factory Age may prove to have been a unique period in which semistupid machines left a highly profitable niche for unskilled people. Now that the machines can look after themselves, the Information Age is pouring its gifts onto the top 5 percent of Otto Ammon’s turnip. The Information Age was already looking far better for the top 10 percent, the so-called cognitive elite. Yet it will be the best of all for the top 10 percent of the top 10 percent, the cognitive double top. In the feudal age, it took one hundred semiskilled peasants to support one highly skilled warlord (or knight) on horseback. The Sovereign Individuals of the information economy will not be warlords but masters of specialized skills, including entrepreneurship and investment. Yet the feudal hundred-to-one ratio seems set to return. For better or worse, the societies of the twenty-first century are likely to be more unequal than those we have lived in during the twentieth.

大多数人将从政治的消亡中获益​​​​

MOST PEOPLE WILL GAIN FROM THE DEATH OF POLITICS

平等主义经济及其所支持的国家不可能不经历危机就消失。虽然“危机”从定义上讲只能持续很短的时间，但我们仍可以想象，国家灭亡的创伤可能会持续数年。我们不会忽视这种创伤（稍后我们将更详细地探讨其影响），重要的是不要忘记，在全球许多地区，向信息经济的过渡将导致产出激增，各地收入都会提高。事实上，在那些从未出现过危机的地区，充分分享工业化带来的好处，但现在已对自由市场开放，各阶层人民的收入都在增加或将会增加。

It is unlikely that the egalitarian economy and the nations it supports can disappear without a crisis. While a “crisis” by definition can last only for a short while, we nonetheless imagine that the trauma of the end of nations could reverberate for years. Without ignoring that trauma, whose dimensions we explore in greater detail later, it is important not to forget that in many areas of the globe the transition to the information economy will lead output to surge, with higher incomes all around. Indeed, in those areas that never shared fully in the benefits of industrialism but are now open to the free market, incomes are rising or will rise among all classes of people.

强制作为经济生活特征的减少将使生产者能够保留此前被没收和重新分配的资产。重新分配通常意味着资产被强行用于价值较低的用途，从而降低资本的生产率。从最擅长投资资源的人手中不成比例地夺取的财富被政客重新分配给那些不太擅长投资的人。在大多数情况下，重新分配的收入被用于低阶经济活动。将资源从系统性强制中解放出来的影响将因管辖范围的不同而有很大差异。这种资源冻结将使福利国家破产，并加剧规模不经济，而这种不经济正在破坏大政府和所有由大政府资助的机构。另一方面，向网络经济的转变将减少在传统上无法大规模组织起来的地区主权下运作的人们所遭受的经济不利影响。

The deflation of compulsion as a feature of economic life will allow producers to retain assets that heretofore have been seized and redistributed. Redistribution usually meant that assets were dragooned into lower-value uses, thus reducing the productivity of capital. Wealth taken disproportionately from persons who were most adept at investing resources was reallocated by politicians to those who were less adept. In most cases, redistributed income was employed in lower-order economic activities. The effects of freeing resources from systematic compulsion will vary greatly among jurisdictions. This freezing of resources will bankrupt welfare states, and enhance diseconomies to scale that are undermining large governments and all institutions subsidized by large governments. On the other hand, the shift to the cybereconomy will reduce the economic drawbacks suffered by people operating under sovereignties in regions that have traditionally suffered from the inability to organize on a large scale.

“如果世界是一个大市场，那么每个员工都会与世界上所有能做同样工作的人竞争。这样的人很多，而且很多人都很饿。” ⁸

—ANDREW S. G ROVE，英特尔公司总裁​​

“If the world operates as one big market, every employee will compete with every person anywhere in the world who is capable of doing the same job. There are lots of them and many of them are hungry.”⁸

—ANDREW S. GROVE, PRESIDENT, INTEL CORP.

转移区位优势​​

SHIFTING LOCATIONAL ADVANTAGES

因为暴力行为的回报不再上升，生活在一个可以控制暴力行为的政府手下将毫无益处。曾经称职的政府将不再是财富积累的朋友，而是他们的敌人。高额税收、繁重的监管成本和雄心勃勃的收入再分配承诺将使他们控制的地区成为不适合做生意的环境。

Because there will no longer be rising returns to violence, there will be no advantage to living under a government that could capture them. Once-competent governments will no longer be the friends of wealth accumulation, but their enemies. High taxes, burdensome regulatory costs, and ambitious commitments to income redistribution will make territories under their control uninviting settings in which to do business.

那些生活在工业化时期仍然贫穷或欠发达的司法管辖区的人，从经济从地理限制中解放出来中获益最多。这与你所听到的正好相反。围绕信息经济的出现和主权个人的崛起的主要争议将集中在政治消亡对“公平”产生的所谓不利影响上。全球信息经济的出现无疑将对大规模收入再分配造成致命打击。工业时代收入再分配的主要受益者是富裕司法管辖区的居民其消费水平是世界平均水平的20倍，只有在OECD国家，收入再分配才对提高非技术劳动者的收入产生了显著的效果。

Those who live in jurisdictions that remained poor or underdeveloped during the industrial period have the most to gain by the liberation of economies from the confines of geography. This is contrary to what you will hear. The main controversy surrounding the advent of the information economy and the rise of the Sovereign Individual will focus on the allegedly adverse effects on “fairness” arising from the death of politics. It is certainly true that the advent of the global information economy will deal a mortal blow to large-scale income redistribution. The main beneficiaries of income redistribution in the Industrial Age have been inhabitants of wealthy jurisdictions whose level of consumption is twenty times higher than the world average. Only within the OECD countries has income redistribution had noticeable effects in raising incomes of unskilled persons.

收入不平等现象在各个司法管辖区之间最为严重。收入再分配对缓解这一现象几乎没有起到什么作用。事实上，我们认为，外国援助和国际发展计划通过补贴无能的政府，产生了降低穷国穷人实际收入的负面影响。在分析信息革命对道德的影响时，我们会更深入地考虑这个问题。

The greatest income inequalities have been observed among jurisdictions. Income redistribution has done little to alleviate them. In fact, we believe that foreign aid and international development programs have had the perverse effect of lowering the real incomes of poor people in poor countries by subsidizing incompetent governments. This is an issue we consider in more depth in analyzing the impact of the Information Revolution on morality.

百年来收入不平等加剧

A Century of Rising Income Inequality

在工业化时期，决定普通人一生收入的最大因素是他所居住的政治管辖区。与当今富裕经济体的普遍印象相反，工业化时期的收入不平等迅速加剧。世界银行引用的一项估计表明，最富裕国家的人均收入从 1870 年最贫穷国家的 11 倍飙升至 1985 年的 52 倍。9虽然不平等在全球范围内急剧增加，^但对于居住在富裕工业化国家的一小部分人来说，情况往往并非如此。收入不平等在各个管辖区之间加剧，而不是在管辖区内加剧。

During the industrial period, the factor that contributed most to determining the ordinary person’s lifetime income was the political jurisdiction in which he happened to reside. Contrary to the common impression in rich economies today, income inequality rose rapidly during the industrial period. An estimate cited by the World Bank suggests that average per capita income in the richest countries ballooned from eleven times that in the poorest countries in 1870 to fifty-two times in 1985.⁹ While inequality increased dramatically on a global basis, it often appeared otherwise to the fraction of the world inhabiting the wealthy industrial countries. Income inequality rose among jurisdictions rather than within them.

出于我们已经探讨过的原因，工业技术本身的特性有助于确保在半能干的政府掌握大规模权力的管辖范围内缩小收入差距。当暴力回报不断上升时，就像在工业时代一样，大规模运作的政府往往由其雇员控制。这使得对这些政府对资源的索取进行控制实际上是不可能的。只要权力的大小超过权力使用效率，他们对资源的不受制约的控制就带来了重要的军事优势。由雇员控制的政府的一个非偶然的必然结果是收入再分配的急剧加速。几乎每个社会都有一些收入再分配的规定，至少在特殊情况下是暂时的。然而，仔细阅读向穷人提供援助的历史就会发现，当贫困程度最低时，“福利”往往更为慷慨。当大量人的收入减少时，收入再分配更有可能受到限制。 20 世纪下半叶富裕工业社会的条件几乎完美，非常适合收入再分配。这导致这些受优待的管辖区内非技术工人的报酬大大提高。适时，它甚至为那些根本不工作的人提供了高水平的消费。

For reasons we have already explored, the character of industrial technology itself helped assure that income gaps would narrow within jurisdictions where halfway competent governments mastered the exercise of power on a large scale. When returns to violence were rising, as they were during the Industrial Age, governments that operated on a large scale tended to be controlled by their employees. This made it effectively impossible to impose controls on the claims these governments made over resources. Their unchecked control over resources conveyed an important military advantage so long as magnitude of power predominated over the efficiency with which it was used. A not-incidental corollary of government controlled by its employees was a sharp acceleration of income redistribution. Almost every society has some provision for income redistribution, at least on a temporary basis in extraordinary circumstances. However, a close reading of the history of the provision of aid to the poor shows that “welfare” benefits tend to be more generous when poverty is minimal. Income redistribution is more likely to be curtailed when incomes for large numbers weaken. Conditions in the wealthy industrial societies in the last half of the twentieth century were almost perfect for redistributing income. This led to much higher rewards for unskilled work within these favored jurisdictions. In due course, it even provided high levels of consumption for those who did not work at all.

工业财富的悖论

The Paradox of Industrial Wealth

讽刺的是，正是在这些管辖区，更多的人变得富有。一旦你理解了前几章探讨的超级政治动态，这个明显的悖论就完全说得通了。工业经济的主要部门需要大规模维持秩序才能最佳运作。这使得它们特别容易受到工会和政府的敲诈，因为工会和政府渴望最大限度地扩大其控制下的人数。然而，广泛的收入再分配并没有完全抑制工业经济的运作能力。因此，任何有幸在工业化鼎盛时期出生在西欧、前英国殖民地或日本的人，都可能比南美、东欧、苏联后期、非洲和亚洲大陆的同等技能的人富裕得多。信息技术的有益影响将包括帮助克服许多发展障碍，这些障碍阻碍了世界大多数人口在现代大部分时期享受自由市场的许多好处。

The irony is that it was also in these jurisdictions that more people became wealthy. This apparent paradox makes perfect sense once you understand the dynamics of megapolitics explored in previous chapters. Leading sectors of the industrial economy required the maintenance of order on a large scale to function optimally. This made them particularly vulnerable to extortion by unions and governments eager to maximize the number of persons under their sway. Yet widespread redistribution of income did not totally stifle the ability of the industrial economy to function. Anyone lucky enough to be born in Western Europe, the former British settlement colonies, or Japan during the high-water period of industrialism was therefore likely to be far richer than a person of equivalent skills in South America, Eastern Europe, the late Soviet Union, Africa, and the landmass of Asia. The beneficial impact of information technology will include helping to overcome many of the obstacles to development that prevented the majority of the world’s population from enjoying many of the benefits of free markets during much of the modern period.

“贫穷国家的本土特征明显不适合有效的大规模组织，尤其是那些必须在广大地理区域内运作（就像政府那样）的大型组织。” ¹⁰

—曼库尔森​​

“The indigenous characteristics of poor countries are strikingly inhospitable to effective large-scale organization, especially to large-scale organizations that have to operate (as governments do) over a large geographical area.”¹⁰

—MANCUR OLSON

规模不经济和增长迟缓​​

DISECONOMIES OF SCALE AND RETARDED GROWTH

正如曼瑟尔·奥尔森所表明的那样，20 世纪的落后并不是由于缺乏资本或专业技能本身。在 1987 年（柏林墙倒塌前两年）发表的论文《规模不经济与发展》中，奥尔森写道：“如果穷国的资本确实稀缺，那么其‘边际生产力’以及其使用利润率应该高于富裕国家。许多接受了不可忽略的外国援助的国家增长率较低，而一些在穷国建造的现代工厂生产率较低，进一步降低了‘资本稀缺’解释欠发达的可信度。” ¹¹这肯定是正确的。如果资本或技能稀缺是主要缺陷，那么穷国获得的回报将高于发达国家。技术人员和资本都会涌入这些地区，直到回报率趋于平稳。事实上，情况往往相反。大量受过教育的人从落后地区外流。少数幸运的人设法在这些地方积累了资本，并尽可能快地将资本输出到瑞士和其他发达国家。

As Mancur Olson has demonstrated, backwardness in the twentieth century was not due to lack of capital or specialized skills per se. In “Diseconomies of Scale and Development,” an essay published in 1987, two years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Olson wrote, “If capital had in fact been in scarce supply in the poor countries, its ‘marginal productivity’ and so the profitability of its use ought to be greater than in the prosperous countries. The low growth rates of many countries that received nonnegligible amounts of foreign aid and the low productivity of some modern factories that were built in poor countries have further lessened the credibility of the ‘scarcity of capital’ explanation of underdevelopment.”¹¹ This must be right. Had capital or skill scarcity been the main deficiency, the returns earned by both in poor jurisdictions would have been higher than in developed countries. Both skilled personnel and capital would have flooded into these regions until the returns leveled out. In fact, the opposite was often the case. There was a substantial outmigration of educated people from backward jurisdictions. And the lucky few who did manage to accumulate capital in such places exported it as rapidly as possible to Switzerland and other advanced countries.

更好的政府无法通过进口获得

Better Government Could Not Be Imported

奥尔森认为，落后国家发展的真正障碍是一种无法轻易借用或从国外进口的生产要素，即政府，我们对此也表示同意。随着二十世纪的到来，这个问题愈发严重。1900 年，英国、法国和其他一些欧洲国家开始向本土权力无法有效大规模运作的地区输出称职的政府。但二十世纪不断变化的大政治条件提高了成本，降低了这种活动带来的回报。殖民主义，或者说不那么为人所熟知的帝国主义，不再是一种有利可图的主张。技术进步提高了将权力从中心投射到边缘的成本，降低了有效抵抗的军事成本。因此，帝国主义撤退，或者只留在百慕大或开曼群岛等小飞地上。

Olson argues, and we agree, that the true obstacle to development in backward countries has been the one factor of production that could not be easily borrowed or imported from abroad, namely government. This is a problem that worsened as the twentieth century unfolded. In 1900, Great Britain and France, along with some other European countries, were in the business of exporting competent government to regions where indigenous powers were incapable of functioning effectively on a large scale. But shifting megapolitical conditions in the twentieth century raised the costs and lowered the returns for this activity. Colonialism, or imperialism, as it was less fondly known, ceased to be a paying proposition. Shifts in technology raised the costs of projecting power from the center to the periphery and lowered the military costs of an effective resistance. Consequently, imperial powers withdrew, or stayed on only in tiny enclaves, like Bermuda or the Cayman Islands.

“如果后殖民民族国家已经成为进步的枷锁，正如 20 世纪 80 年代末越来越多的非洲批评家似乎同意的那样，那么主要原因显而易见。无论国家宣传如何宣称，它并没有解放和保护其公民；相反，它的整体效果是束缚和剥削，或者，它根本无法在任何社会意义上发挥作用。” ¹²

—巴西尔·戴维森

“If the postcolonial nation-state had become a shackle on progress, as more and more critics in Africa seemed to agree by the end of the 1980s, the prime reason could appear in little doubt. The state was not liberating and protective of its citizens, no matter what its propaganda claimed; on the contrary, its gross effect was constricting and exploitative, or else, it simply failed to operate in any social sense at all.”¹²

—BASIL DAVIDSON

在没有欧洲人定居的国家，取代殖民统治的本土政府从缺乏经营任何大型企业经验或技能的人群中选拔领导人和管理人员。在许多情况下，特别是在非洲，从殖民势力撤离后继承下来的基础设施迅速遭到掠夺、破坏或年久失修。电话线被拾荒者拆毁并打造成手镯。道路不再维护。铁路线因路基崩塌和机车故障而变得毫无用处。在扎伊尔，比利时人建造的复杂交通基础设施到 1990 年，它几乎完全消失了。只有几艘摇摇欲坠的河船继续运行，其中一艘被独裁者接管作为一种水上宫殿。

The indigenous governments that replaced colonial rule in the countries that were not settled by Europeans drew their leaders and administrators from populations who had little experience or skill at running any type of large-scale enterprise. In many cases, especially in Africa, infrastructure inherited from the departing colonial powers was rapidly looted, destroyed, or allowed to fall into disrepair. Telephone lines were torn down by scavengers and hammered into bracelets. Roads were no longer maintained. Rail lines became useless as roadbeds fell apart and locomotives broke down. In Zaire, the elaborate transportation infrastructure installed by the Belgians had almost totally disappeared by 1990. Only a few creaky riverboats continued to function, one of which was taken over as a kind of floating palace by the dictator.

不可靠的通讯和交通反映了落后民族国家在维持秩序方面的无能。它们使物价居高不下，并最大限度地减少了世界上大多数人口的机会。正如奥尔森强调的那样：

Undependable communication and transport reflect the incompetence of backward nation-states at maintaining order. They have kept prices high and minimized opportunities for most of the world’s population. As Olson emphasizes:

首先，交通和通讯条件差，企业往往只能依赖当地的生产要素，当企业规模扩大时，就必须到更远的地方获取生产要素，而交通和通讯条件越差，这些要素成本就会随着产量的扩大而上升得越快。

较差的交通和通讯系统不利于大型企业有效的第二个也是更重要的原因是，它们使这些企业更难进行有效的协调。” ¹³

First, poor transportation and communication tend to force a firm to rely mainly on local factors of production. When a firm’s scale increases, it will have to go further afield to obtain factors of production, and the poorer the transportation and communications systems the faster these factor costs will rise with expanding output.

The second and more important reason why poor transportation and communication systems work against effective large-scale enterprises is that they make it far more difficult to coordinate such enterprises effectively.”¹³

减轻不良政府的负担

Lightening the Burden of Bad Government

随着信息技术将人们的收入来源与居住地分离，世界上那些雄心勃勃的穷人比任何人都更能从中受益。数字蜂窝电话等新技术使通信能够独立运行，而不受当地警察保护辖区内每根电线杆免受铜线窃贼侵害的能力的影响。随着无线传真和互联网连接的普及，极度贫困的邮局员工是否会为了偷邮票而偷邮件已不再那么重要。

The ambitious poor of the world, more than anyone, stand to benefit as information technology disconnects the capacity to earn income from the locale in which one lives. New technologies, such as the digital cellular telephone, allow communications to function independently of the ability of the local police to defend every telephone pole in a jurisdiction from copper thieves. As wireless fax and Internet connections become available, it no longer matters so much whether desperately poor postal employees will pilfer mail just to steal the stamp.

在许多情况下，有效的通信甚至取代了对商品和服务的物理运输的需求。更好的通信和大大增强的计算能力不仅使复杂活动的协调更便宜、更有效；它们还降低了规模经济并解散了大型组织。这些变化都倾向于减少落后国家人民因生活在无能的政府之下而遭受的惩罚。信息革命将使政府是否能够有效运作变得不那么重要。因此，生活在传统贫困国家的人们将更容易克服政府迄今为止在经济增长道路上设置的障碍。

In many cases, effective communications are even replacing the need for the physical transport of goods and services. Better communications and vastly increased computational power not only make coordination of complex activities cheaper and more effective; they also lower scale economies and dissolve large organizations. These changes all tend to reduce the penalty that persons in backward countries have suffered for living under incompetent governments. The Information Revolution will make it much less important whether governments are able to function capably. It will therefore be easier for persons living in traditionally poor countries to surmount the hurdles that their governments have heretofore placed in the path of economic growth.

信息时代的平等机会

Equal Opportunity in the Information Age

在信息时代，熟悉的区位优势将迅速被技术所改变。具有类似技能的人的收入能力将变得更加平等，无论他们生活在哪个司法管辖区。这种情况已经开始发生。由于那些利用强制和地方优势重新分配收入的机构正在失去权力，司法管辖区内的收入不平等将会加剧。全球竞争也将倾向于增加每个领域最有才华的个人的收入，无论他们生活在何处，就像现在在职业体育中一样。全球市场上的卓越表现所产生的边际价值将是巨大的。

In the Information Age, familiar locational advantages will rapidly be transformed by technology. Earnings capacity for persons of similar skills will become much more equal, no matter in what jurisdiction they live. This has already begun to happen. Because institutions that have employed compulsion and local advantage to redistribute income are losing power, income inequality within jurisdictions will rise. Global competition will also tend to increase the income earned by the most talented individuals in each field, wherever they live, much as it does now in professional athletics. The marginal value generated by superior performance in a global market will be huge.

虽然公众辩论的焦点是经合组织国家日益加剧的“不平等”，但世界各地的个人将享有更加平等的机会。他们将不再需要生活在一个运行良好的司法管辖区才能获得成功。天赋和发展这些天赋的意愿将在比以往更加平等的竞争环境中得到衡量。工业化时期导致富国和穷国之间不平等加剧的司法管辖区优势将发生巨大变化。

While public debate will focus on growing “inequality” in the OECD countries, individuals everywhere will enjoy far more nearly equal opportunity. They will no longer need to live in a jurisdiction that functions well on a large scale in order to succeed. Innate abilities and the willingness to develop them will be measured on a more equal playing field than ever before. Jurisdictional advantages that led to widening inequality between rich and poor economies during the industrial period will change dramatically.

贫困地区回报率更高

Higher Returns in Poor Areas

随着网络经济的出现，贫困地区政府设置的阻碍自由市场运作的障碍将大大减少。因此，在许多目前贫困的地区，短缺的资本和技能实际上将获得更高的回报，就像 20 世纪 50 年代的发展理论家所假设的那样。而且资本和技能都将更容易进口。新兴经济体将不再需要像工业时代那样依赖当地的生产要素。它们增强的远程利用资本和专业知识的能力将带来更高的增长率。无论无能的政府是否变得更诚实或更有能力保护产权，这种情况都会发生。由于缺乏对网络空间的权力，坏政府根本无法阻止其管辖范围内的人们从经济自由中受益。

The obstacles that governments in poorer regions place in the way of functioning free markets will be much diminished as the cybereconomy comes on line. As a consequence, capital and skills in short supply will in fact earn higher returns in many currently poor areas, much as the development theorists of the 1950s postulated they should. And both capital and skills will be far more readily importable. Emerging economies will no longer need to rely as much as during the Industrial Age upon local factors of production. Their enhanced ability to draw upon capital and expertise at a distance will lead to higher rates of growth. This will happen whether or not incompetent governments become more honest or better able to protect property rights. Lacking power over cyberspace, bad governments will simply be less able to stop people in their jurisdictions from benefiting from economic freedom.

积极强化

Positive Reinforcement

在新的网络经济中，信息技术的几乎完全可移植性将禁止囤积工业时代产生的许多司法管辖权优势。越来越多的司法管辖区之间的竞争加剧将产生新类型的本地优势。主权将被商业化，而不是掠夺性的。政府将被迫在竞争的压力下制定政策以吸引其人民那些对经济福祉做出最大贡献的客户，而不是那些贡献不大或经济贡献为负的客户。

In the new cybereconomy, the almost total portability of information technology will prohibit the hoarding of many of the jurisdictional advantages that arose in the Industrial Age. Enhanced competition between increasing numbers of jurisdictions will turn on new types of local advantage. Sovereignty will be commercialized rather than predatory. Governments will be obliged by the force of competition to set policies to appeal to those of their customers who make the greatest contributions to economic well-being, not to those who contribute little or whose economic contributions are negative.

这将代表着与二十世纪普遍做法的巨大变化。民族国家的意识形态是，生活可以而且应该通过补贴不良结果和惩罚良好结果来以积极的方式进行规范。贫穷是不良的，因此，穷人得到了补贴。致富是理想的，因此，对富人征收惩罚性税收，以使生活更加“公平”。

This will represent a tremendous change from the common practice of the twentieth century. The ideology of the nation-state was that life can and should be regulated in a positive way by subsidizing undesirable outcomes and penalizing desirable ones. To be poor is undesirable; therefore, the poor were subsidized. To become rich is desirable; therefore, punitive taxes were laid on the rich to make life more “fair.”

由于整个政策方针都植根于一个经不起任何呼吁的超级政治基础，因此补贴失调的不良后果并不重要。也没有多少人考虑到技能、辛勤工作或聪明才智是如何赚取被重新分配的财富的。结果以应得的福利来衡量。二十世纪的政治观点认为，为了使结果“公平”，结果必须是平等的。

Because this whole policy approach was rooted in a megapolitical foundation that withstood all appeal, it mattered little what the perverse consequences of subsidizing dysfunction were. Nor was there much accounting for the skill, hard work, or ingenuity that went into earning the wealth that was redistributed. Outcomes were measured in terms of entitlements. The twentieth-century political view assumed that in order for outcomes to be “fair” they had to be equal.

新范式

The New Paradigm

21 世纪新的大政治条件将允许市场测试来规范以前由政治主导的领域的结果。市场范式假定可以通过奖励理想结果和惩罚不良结果来更好地规范结果。贫穷是不可取的，而致富是可取的。因此，激励措施应该奖励财富创造并鼓励人们为他们消费的资源买单。当人们能够保留更多他们所赚的钱时，生活会更加“公平”。

The new megapolitical conditions of the twenty-first century will allow market tests to regulate outcomes in areas formerly dominated by politics. The market paradigm presupposes that results can be better regulated by rewarding desirable outcomes and penalizing undesirable ones. To be poor is undesirable, and to become rich is desirable. Therefore, incentives should reward wealth creation and encourage people to pay for the resources they consume. Life is more “fair” when people get to keep more of what they earn.

这种观点在新千年中会比在即将结束的世纪中更加常见。此外，由于它将建立在超级政治的基础上，因此它将比以往任何时候都更具说服力。信息时代的资本正变得越来越流动。赚取高收入的能力不再与特定地点的居住地挂钩，而大多数财富都是通过操纵自然资源创造的。随着时间的推移，人们使用高度便携的信息技术创造资产变得越来越容易，这些资产受到暴力手段的威胁比以往任何形式的财富都要小得多。

This is a view that will be heard more frequently in the new millennium than it was in the century now ending. Furthermore, it will be compelling as never before because it will be megapolitically founded. Capital in the Information Age is growing more mobile by the moment. The capacity to earn high income is no longer tied to residence in specific locations, as was the case when most wealth was created by manipulating natural resources. With every day that passes, it becomes easier for people using highly portable information technology to create assets that are far less subject to the leverage of violence than any form of wealth has ever been before.

武断的政治管制只会增加成本，而不会产生抵消性的市场利益，这种管制很快就会变得不可行。强大的竞争力量正趋向于使全球商品、服务、劳动力和资本的价格趋于均等。各国政府将无法像过去那样随意实施政策。任何试图对某项活动实施比其他主权国家更繁重的管制的政府，都只会驱赶这项活动。当然，在某些情况下，驱赶不受欢迎的活动将取悦市场，并使这些辖区更加受欢迎和繁荣。从这个意义上讲，某些规定可以比作连锁酒店业主制定的房屋规则。如果他们禁止人们赤脚行走或在大厅吸烟，他们无疑会失去某些客户。但拒绝这些客户可能不会让辖区整体客户流失，甚至不会减少其总收入。穿鞋不吸烟的人可能会付出更多，因为赤脚吸烟者被排除在外。同样，使在某个辖区经营炼油厂成本高昂或不可能的法规可能会促使炼油厂在其他地方发展，而不会剥夺整个辖区的收入。

Arbitrary political regulations that impose costs without creating offsetting market benefits will soon be nonviable. Powerful competitive forces are tending to equalize the prices of goods, services, labor, and capital across the globe. Governments will have less latitude to impose arbitrary policies than they are accustomed to enjoy. Any government that attempts to impose more burdensome regulations on an activity than other sovereignties will simply drive that activity away. In some cases, of course, driving away unwanted activities will please the market and make those jurisdictions all the more popular and prosperous. In this sense, certain regulations may be compared to the house rules imposed by the proprietors of a hotel chain. If they prohibit people from walking barefoot or smoking in the lobby, they will no doubt lose certain customers. But turning away those customers may not cost the jurisdiction customers overall, or even reduce its total revenues. Well-shod nonsmokers may pay more precisely because barefoot smokers are excluded. Equally, regulations that make it costly or impossible to operate a rendering plant in a certain jurisdiction may drive the rendering elsewhere without depriving the jurisdiction as a whole of income.

这些例子表明，在极少数情况下，法规可能会产生积极而非消极的市场价值，尤其是在司法管辖区数量迅速增加的世界中。在许多地方，维护高标准的公共卫生、清洁空气和清洁水的规则将受到高度重视。其他有时更为奇特的法规和契约也是如此，这些法规和契约可能是房地产开发商或迎合特定细分市场的酒店所制定的。

These examples demonstrate how regulations may in rare circumstances have a positive rather than a negative market value, especially in a world with a rapidly multiplying number of jurisdictions. Rules that preserve high standards of public health, clean air, and clean water will be highly valued in many locales. So will other, sometimes more exotic regulations and covenants of the kind that might be imposed by real estate developers or hotels catering to certain market segments.

网络空间没有海关

No Customs House in Cyberspace

我们预计主权商业化将迅速导致许多大片领土主权的下放。信息技术不能受到边境管制，而边境管制仍会阻碍制成品和农产品的贸易，这一事实本身就具有重要意义。这意味着，随着信息贸易取代实体产品创造财富，保护主义将随着时间的推移而变得不那么有效。这也意味着较小的地区将越来越少地依赖广泛的政治管辖权来确保进入它们可以赚取收入的市场。

We expect the commercialization of sovereignty to rapidly lead to the devolution of many large territorial sovereignties. The very fact that information technology cannot be subjected to border controls of the kind that can still impede the trade of manufactures and farm goods has important implications. It means that protectionism will be less effective over time as trade in information displaces physical products in the generation of wealth. It also means that smaller regions will be ever less dependent upon the maintenance of extensive political jurisdictions in order to assure access to markets in which they can earn income.

信息技术使以前受保护的服务业从业人员面临国外竞争。如果二十年前多伦多的一家公司想雇佣一名簿记员，那么这个人必须身处多伦多，或通勤距离内的附近社区。在信息时代，布达佩斯或印度班加罗尔的簿记员可以完成这项工作，并通过互联网以加密形式下载所需的所有材料。通过卫星链路的即时通信，只需通过调制解调器和传真机，世界任何地方都只需片刻即可到达。需要股票分析师的人可以以华尔街一名分析师的价格在印度雇佣 27 名分析师。随着信息技术每 18 个月进步一个或多个数量级（摩尔定律），越来越多的服务业工人将面临价格竞争，而这种竞争基本上超出了政客的阻止能力。这种竞争最终将完全适用于会计等专业人才。数字律师和网络医生将在信息经济中大量涌现。

Information technology exposes people working in formerly protected service sectors to foreign competition. If a firm in Toronto wished to hire a bookkeeper twenty years ago, that person had to be physically located in Toronto, or in a nearby community within commuting distance. In the Information Age, a bookkeeper in Budapest or Bangalore, India, could do the job, and download all the material needed in encrypted form over the Internet. Instant communication through satellite links makes any part of the world only a moment away by modem and fax. Someone in need of stock analysts could hire twenty-seven in India for the price of one on Wall Street. As information technology improves by a magnitude or more every eighteen months (Moore’s Law), ever-greater numbers of service-sector workers will be exposed to price competition that is essentially beyond the capacity of politicians to impede. This competition will eventually apply as fully to the learned professions as to bookkeepers. Digital lawyers and cyberdoctors will proliferate in the Information Economy.

民族国家的死亡守望

Death Watch for Nation-States

随着民族国家边界内以前享有的经济利益逐渐消失，民族国家本身最终也将在沉重的债务负担下崩溃。但所有民族国家都处于垂死状态这一事实并不意味着它们注定会在同一时刻消亡。事实远非如此。权力下放的压力往往在大多数人口收入停滞或下降的大型政治实体中最为强烈。拉丁美洲和亚洲的人均收入快速增长的管辖区可能会持续几代人，或者直到那里的终生收入前景与以前富裕的工业化国家相当。到那时，将不再有容易获得的成本替代收益，增长政治将变得更具挑战性。

With the economic benefits formerly captured within the boundaries of nation-states falling away, the nation-states themselves will eventually collapse under their weighty liabilities. But the fact that all nation-states are on a death watch does not mean that they are all destined to expire at the same moment. Far from it. Devolutionary pressures will tend to be most intense in large political entities where incomes for most of the population are stagnant or falling. Jurisdictions in Latin America and Asia where per capita income is rising rapidly may endure for generations, or until lifetime income prospects there equate with those in the formerly rich industrial countries. At that point, there will no longer be easy cost-substituting gains to be had, and the politics of growth will become more challenging.

我们还怀疑，拥有一个主要大都市的国家将比拥有多个大城市的国家保持更长时间的凝聚力，因为后者意味着有多个利益中心及其不同的腹地。

We also suspect that nation-states with a single major metropolis will remain coherent longer than those with several big cities, which imply multiple centers of interest with their various hinterlands.

另一个促使权力下放的因素是中央政府的高负债。三个相对负债最高的富裕工业国家——加拿大、比利时和意大利——并非巧合地都是分离主义运动发达的国家。这三个国家都长期遭受预算赤字的困扰，目前国家债务已超过 GDP 的 100%。随着每个国家国家债务的增加，分离主义运动的吸引力也随之增长。在意大利，北方联盟已成为一个充满活力和受欢迎的地区政治运动。它的政纲基于一个简单的数学观察：如果意大利北部或“帕多尼亚”的大部分收入不被挪用来补贴罗马和较贫穷的南部，它将比瑞士更富有。北方联盟提出了一个显而易见的解决方案：脱离意大利，从而摆脱一些复利的可怕后果。同样，在国家债务超过 GDP 的 130% 的比利时，弗拉芒人和瓦隆人就像一对即将离婚的敌对夫妇一样在行动。越来越多的佛兰芒人少数派认为，比利时对瓦隆人进行了不公平的补贴，将比利时一分为二可以改善瓦隆人的经济状况。

Another spur to devolution will be high indebtedness of the central government. The three wealthy industrial countries with the highest relative indebtedness—Canada, Belgium, and Italy—are not coincidentally nations with advanced separatist movements. All three countries have suffered from chronic budget deficits and now have national debts that exceed 100 percent of GDP. As the national debt has mounted in each country, the appeal of separatist movements has grown as well. In Italy, the Northern League has emerged as a dynamic and popular regional political movement. Its platform is based upon a simple mathematical observation: northern Italy, or “Padonia,” would be richer than Switzerland if large portions of its income were not siphoned off to subsidize Rome and the poorer south. The Northern League proposes an obvious solution: secede from Italy, and thus escape from some of the dire consequences of compound interest. Likewise, in Belgium, where the national debt exceeds 130 percent of GDP, the Flemings and Walloons are maneuvering like a hostile couple before a divorce. A growing minority among the Flemings argue that they are unfairly subsidizing the Walloons, and could improve their economic condition by splitting Belgium in two.

加拿大的情况有所不同，法语加拿大是目前鼓吹分离主义的主要地区，历史上一直受到英语加拿大的资助。但随着联邦债务和赤字的增加，魁北克开始意识到这种形式的收入再分配将会衰落。因此，魁北克政团正在尝试一种十年来一直缺乏的吸引力前承诺通过取消加拿大联邦税来提高税后收入。分离主义领导人还建议魁北克脱离加拿大，不承担相应的联邦债务负担。

Canada’s case differs in the detail that French Canada, the main region now agitating for separatism, has historically been subsidized by English Canada. But as the federal debt and deficit mount, the realization is dawning in Quebec that this form of income redistribution will decline. The Bloc Québecois is therefore flirting with an appeal that it lacked a decade ago—the promise to raise after-tax income by abolishing the payment of Canadian federal tax. Separatist leaders also suggest that Quebec should leave Canada without shouldering a proportionate burden of the federal debt.

英语裔加拿大人反对这种说法，并倾向于对其含义表示不满，因为他们清楚地知道多年来魁北克省获得了巨额资金转移。尽管如此，魁北克人党的号召力仍然很强，加拿大独立公投解体似乎只是时间问题。当其他民族国家的经济状况恶化时，它们也会面临类似的命运。

English Canadians resist this argument and tend to resent its implications because they are keenly aware of the large transfers made to Quebec over the years. Nonetheless, the appeal of the Parti Québecois is strong, and it seems only a matter of time until a secession referendum dissolves Canada. A similar fate awaits other nation-states when their financial circumstances deteriorate.

另一个不利于加拿大长期生存的因素是，加拿大是一个人口稀少的国家，需要维护庞大的工业时代基础设施。向信息时代的过渡不可避免地会降低物理基础设施的利用率。随着远程办公人员取代工厂员工和办公室职员，高速公路和其他交通要道是否重建和维护得当将变得不再重要。随着财政危机四伏，加拿大生活中越来越多的派系将退回到亚当·斯密倡导的 18 世纪公共物品融资的排他性观点。他在《国富论》中写道：

Another factor that bodes ill for Canada’s long-term survival is the fact that it is a thinly populated country with a sprawling industrial-era infrastructure to maintain. The transition to the Information Age is inevitably depreciating physical infrastructure. As telecommuters replace factory employees and office workers, it will matter less whether freeways and other transportation thoroughfares are rebuilt and well-maintained. With fiscal crises pinching on all sides, more and more factions in Canadian life will retreat to the eighteenth-century exclusionary view of the financing of public goods advocated by Adam Smith. He wrote in The Wealth of Nations:

如果伦敦的街道照明和铺设费用由 [国家] 国库承担，那么这些街道的照明和铺设是否可能像现在这样好，甚至花费如此之少。此外，在这种情况下，这笔费用不是通过向伦敦每条街道、教区或地区的居民征收地方税来筹集的，而是由国家的一般收入来支付，因此将通过向王国所有居民征税来筹集，而大多数人并没有从伦敦街道的照明和铺设中获得任何好处^。14

Were the streets of London to be lighted and paved at the expense of the [national] treasury, is there any probability that they would be so well lighted and paved as they are at present, or even at so small an expense. The expense, besides, instead of being raised by a local tax upon the inhabitants of each particlar street, parish or district in London would, in this case, be defrayed out of the general revenue of the state, and would consequently be raised by a tax upon all the inhabitants of the kingdom, of whom the greater part derived no sort of benefit from the lighting and paving of the streets of London.¹⁴

用多伦多代替伦敦，你就会陷入一个方程式中，这个方程式将会在艾伯塔省和不列颠哥伦比亚省的许多人的脑海中浮现。权力下放的逻辑将具有感染力。

For London, substitute Toronto, and you are inside an equation that will be running in the minds of many in Alberta and British Columbia. The logic of devolution will prove infectious.

当加拿大分裂时，这将导致美国太平洋西北地区的分裂活动明显增加。阿拉斯加、华盛顿、俄勒冈、爱达荷和蒙大拿的居民将发现自己在与阿尔伯塔和不列颠哥伦比亚作为独立主权的竞争中处于明显劣势。

When Canada breaks apart, this will lead to a marked increase in secessionist activity in the Pacific Northwest of the United States. Residents of Alaska, Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Montana would find themselves at a distinct disadvantage in competition with Alberta and British Columbia as independent sovereignties.

民族国家之后​​​

AFTER THE NATION-STATE

在民族国家的位置上，你首先会看到省级较小的管辖区，最终会看到较小的主权国家、各种飞地。类似于中世纪城邦，周围是腹地。在被灌输了政治重要性的人们看来，这可能很奇怪，但这些新小国的政策在许多情况下更多地受到企业家定位的影响，而不是政治争论。这些新的、分散的主权国家将迎合不同的口味，就像酒店和餐馆一样，在公共空间内执行特定的规定，以吸引他们吸引顾客的细分市场。当然，这并不是说，以游牧方式组织保护不会产生特殊问题。我们将在下一章中讨论这些问题。

In the place of nation-states you will see, at first, smaller jurisdictions at the provincial level, and ultimately, smaller sovereignties, enclaves of various kinds like medieval city-states surrounded by their hinterlands. As strange as it may seem to people, inculcated with the importance of politics, policies of these new ministates will in many cases be informed more by entrepreneurial positioning than by political wrangling. These new, fragmented sovereignties will cater to different tastes, just as hotels and restaurants do, enforcing specific regulations within their public spaces that appeal to the market segments from, which they draw their customers. This is not to say, of course, that there are not special problems arising from the organization of protection on a nomadic basis. We address these in the next chapter.

“城镇的空气带来自由。”

—中世纪的阿达吉

“Town air brings freedom.”

—MEDIEVAL ADAGE

苍白的非公民

Noncitizens of the Pale

尽管存在这些困难，人类的聪明才智通常能找到一种方法来创建机构，以抓住有利可图的机会，即使需求来自支付能力低的人。如果潜在客户是世界上最富有的人，这种趋势应该更加明显。当过时的产品、组织甚至政府失去吸引力，而且似乎没有立即改善的希望时，退出或“用脚投票”总是一种选择。例如，考虑一下中世纪城镇的发展，这些城镇是逃离封建统治的农奴的安全避难所。它们的作用可能类似于新司法管辖区在适应即将到来的民族国家退出方面的作用。接受逃离某些领主的外来人作为“苍白公民”违背了封建法律和主教权威的现行惯例。但尽管如此，对于那些采用它的人来说，这是一种普遍成功的选择，对削弱封建主义的控制做出了重要贡献。正如中世纪历史学家弗里茨·罗里格所说，世俗领主的农奴“一年零一天后就会成为城镇的自由公民”。15^我们有理由期待，新的制度避难所会根据“新的法律原则”涌现，为国家公民提供财政庇护，就像中世纪城镇为生活在城墙阴影下的封建臣民提供庇护一样。

These difficulties notwithstanding, human ingenuity usually finds a way to create institutions to capture profitable opportunities, even where the demand arises from persons who can pay little. Where the potential customers are among the wealthiest persons on earth, that tendency should be all the more emphatic. Exit, or “voting with your feet,” is always an option when dated products, organizations, or even governments lose their appeal and seem to offer little prospect of immediate improvement. Consider, for example, the growth of medieval towns that served as safe havens for serfs escaping feudal subjugation. Their role may prove analogous to the role of new jurisdictions in accommodating the coming exit from nation-states. The acceptance of aliens escaping from some lord as “citizens of the pale” defied the prevailing conventions of feudal law and episcopal authority. But nonetheless it was a generally successful alternative for those who employed it, contributing importantly to weakening the grip of feudalism. As medieval historian Fritz Rorig put it, the serf of a secular lord would be “a free burgher of the town after a year and a day.”¹⁵ It is reasonable to expect new institutional refuges to spring up, upon “new legal principles,” to provide fiscal refuge to citizens of the state, much as the medieval town offered refuge to feudal subjects who lived within the shadows of its walls.

经济学家阿尔伯特·赫希曼在 1969 年首次出版的《退出、呼声和忠诚》一书中探讨了“用脚投票”的理论微妙之处，他预见到技术进步将增加退出作为应对衰落国家战略的可能性。他写道：“只有当各国因通信和全面现代化的进步而开始变得相似时，过早和过度退出的危险才会出现。”过度退出的现象出现了……” ¹⁶这正是正在发生的事情。信息技术正在迅速消除司法管辖区之间的许多差异，使退出成为更具吸引力的选择。当然，赫希曼词汇中的“过早和过度退出”是从被抛弃的国家最理想的角度来理解的。毫无疑问，中世纪欧洲的领主们认为，他们的农奴“过早和过度退出”让他们陷入了困境，他们在那里获得了自由。

Economist Albert O. Hirschman, who explored the theoretical subtleties of “voting with your feet” in Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, first published in 1969, foresaw that technological advances would increase the likelihood of exit as a strategy for dealing with states in decline. He wrote, “Only as countries start to resemble each other because of the advances in communication and all-round modernization will the danger of premature and excessive exits arise.…”¹⁶ That is precisely what is happening. Information technology is rapidly diminishing many of the differences among jurisdictions, making exit a much more attractive option. Of course, “premature and excessive exits” in Hirschman’s vocabulary are understood from the point of view of what is optimal for the state being deserted. No doubt lords in medieval Europe believed that they suffered from “premature and excessive exits” of their serfs into towns where they achieved freedom.

回到我们之前的例子，假设将有许多小国为逃离垂死民族国家的流亡者提供庇护，这并不像看起来那么牵强。这些主权国家将在流亡条款和条件上展开竞争。一些国家，也许在北美西海岸，可能会迎合那些不吸烟的人，他们不能容忍吸烟者吸二手烟。显然，这样的制度不会受到吸烟者的欢迎。对许多吸烟者来说，禁止他们吸烟的规则似乎是一种武断的强加。

To return to our earlier example, it is not as far-fetched as it might seem to suppose that there will be a number of ministates offering refuge to exiles fleeing the dying nation-states. These sovereignties will compete on terms and conditions of exile. Some, perhaps on the West Coast of North America, may well cater to people who do not smoke and are intolerant of secondhand smoke from those who do. Obviously, such regimes would not be popular with smokers. Rules banning their habit will seem an arbitrary imposition to many smokers.

在大众政治的工业时代，这种意见分歧会在政治运动中得到解决，最终迫使一方或另一方服从更强大的一方的意愿。但解决相互排斥的选择的争论，绝不必须以压制大多数人的偏好的方式进行。

In the industrial era of mass politics, such differences of opinion were fought out in political campaigns that ultimately forced one group or the other to abide by the wishes of the more powerful. But it is by no means essential that contentions about mutually exclusive choices be settled in a way that requires that the preferences of large numbers of people be suppressed.

有些人喜欢吃鹅肝，有些人喜欢吃热狗，还有些人仍然吃豆腐。他们通常不必争论他们的饮食偏好，因为他们的烹饪选择没有联系在一起。没有人强迫所有人吃同样的饭菜。然而，大政治条件确实迫使人们共同消费工业时代政府提供的许多种集体甚至私人物品。为什么？因为大规模经营可以获得巨大的经济优势。因此，将庞大的管辖区划分为每个人都可以随心所欲的飞地是不切实际的，即使是在重要项目上也是如此。亚当·斯密主张的提供公共物品的排他性方法在管辖区数量增加十倍甚至一百倍时更容易适应。在信息时代，越来越多的主权国家将是小飞地，而不是大陆帝国。其中一些可能是北美印第安部落，他们将声称对其保留地和保留地拥有税收管辖权，就像他们现在声称有权经营赌场或无视限制捕鱼一样。

Some individuals like to eat foie gras and others like hot dogs, and others still eat soya curd. They usually do not have to argue about their diet preferences because their culinary choices are not bound together. No one forces all to consume the same meal. Megapolitical conditions did, however, force common consumption of many kinds of collective and even private goods provided by governments in the industrial era. Why? Because there were great economic advantages to be captured by operating at a large scale. It was therefore impractical to divide sprawling jurisdictions into enclaves where everyone could have his own way, even on important items. The exclusionary approach to the provision of public goods argued by Adam Smith can be far more easily accommodated when the number of jurisdictions multiplies by ten or even a hundred times over. In the Information Age, growing numbers of sovereignties will be small enclaves rather than continental empires. Some may be North American Indian bands who will claim tax jurisdiction over their reservations and reserves much as they now claim the right to operate gambling casinos or to fish in defiance of limits.

由于信息技术消除了贸易区权力下放的诸多弊端，新主权国家更可能按照俱乐部或亲和团体的原则运作，而不是按照领土民族国家的方式。正如每个潜在客户都穿同样的衣服，或者看同样的电视节目，并不重要。计划，让所有人都同意定义分散主权治理风格的亲和点，这一点并不像看起来那么重要。

Because information technology eliminates many of the drawbacks of devolving trading areas, it will be practical for the new sovereignties to operate more on the principles of clubs or affinity groups than those that governed territorial nation-states. Just as it is not crucial that every potential customer share the same taste in clothes, or watch the same television programs, it will be less important than it may seem that everyone agree with affinity points that define the governing style of fragmented sovereignties.

品味的广泛分散将导致主权的分化，就像服装风格或电视广播的选择范围越来越广一样。一些微型国家甚至可能像连锁酒店集团一样相互联系，或共同运作，以在警察职能和其他政府剩余服务方面取得优势。那些喜欢干净街道、讨厌在桌面下发现口香糖的人会发现新加坡很有魅力。《瘪四与大头蛋》的粉丝不会。那些喜欢狂野夜生活的人会更喜欢澳门或巴拿马，或类似的地方。对一个司法管辖区的习俗感到不舒服的顾客会受到其他司法管辖区的欢迎。虽然盐湖城可能没有烟，但哈瓦那的新城邦（可能改名为基督山）可能会被笼罩在一片雪茄烟雾中。

Widely dispersed tastes will result in widely divergent styles of fragmented sovereignty, much as there are increasingly wide choices in clothing style or television broadcasts. Some microstates may even be linked like hotel groups in franchises, or operate together to achieve advantages in police functions and other residual services of government. Those who like clean streets and resent finding gum under tabletops will find Singapore fetching. Fans of Beavis and Butthead won’t. Those who like wild nightlife will prefer Macao or Panama, or some similar place. Customers uncomfortable with mores in one jurisdiction will be welcomed in others. While Salt Lake City may be smokeless, the new city-state in Havana, perhaps renamed Monte Cristo, will probably be shrouded in a cloud of cigar smoke.

“这意味着，工业社会的所有垄断、等级制度、金字塔和电网都将在将智能分发到所有网络边缘的持续压力下消失。最重要的是，摩尔定律将推翻当今美国权力的关键集中点、关键的物理聚集：大城市——现在依靠生命支持系统生存的大型工业城市——每年从我们所有人那里获得约 3600 亿美元的直接补贴。大城市是工业时代遗留下来的包袱。” ¹⁷

—乔治·吉尔德

“It means that all of the monopolies and hierarchies and pyramids and power grids of industrial society are going to dissolve before this constant pressure of distributing intelligence to the fringes of all networks. Above all, Moore’s Law will overthrow the key concentration, the key physical conglomeration of power in America today: the big city—that big set of industrial cities that now lives on life-support systems—some $360 billion of direct subsidies from all the rest of us every year. Big cities are leftover baggage from the industrial era.”¹⁷

—GEORGE GILDER

微型主权国家或“城邦”的重新出现，其讽刺之处在于，这可能与许多城市的空置同时发生。大城市在很大程度上是西方工业主义的产物。它伴随着工厂体系的兴起，以在生产自然资源含量高的产品时实现规模经济。

A peculiar irony of the re-emergence of micro-sovereignties or “city-states” is that it may coincide with the emptying out of many cities. The large city was largely an artifact of industrialism in the West. It arose with the factory system to capture scale economies in the manufacture of products with high natural resource content.

十九世纪初，人口超过 10 万的城市被认为是特大城市，而在人口统计令人怀疑的亚洲以外，没有哪个城市的人口超过 100 万。1800 年，美国最大的城市是费城，人口为 69,403 人。纽约只有 60,489 人。巴尔的摩是美国第三大城市，人口为 26,114 人。18按照 20 世纪的标准，欧洲大部分后来成为大都市的城市人口都很少。伦敦人口为^864,845人，可能是世界上最大的城市。巴黎人口为 547,756 人，是 1801 年欧洲唯一一个人口超过 50 万的城市。19里斯本人口为 35 万。20^{维也纳人口}为 252,000。²¹到 1819 年，柏林人口才刚刚超过 20 万。22^马德里人口为 156,670 人。23 ¹⁸⁰²年布鲁塞尔人口为 66,297 人。布达佩斯人口仅为 61,000 人^。24

When the nineteenth century opened, cities of more than 100,000 were considered huge, and outside of Asia, where population statistics were doubtful, there were no cities of more than a million persons. The largest city in the United States in 1800 was Philadelphia, with a population of 69,403. New York had just 60,489. Baltimore was the third largest city in America with 26,114 inhabitants.¹⁸ Most of what were to become the great metropolitan cities of Europe had populations that are tiny by twentieth-century standards. London, with a population of 864,845, was probably the biggest city in the world. Paris, with 547,756, was the only other city in Europe with more than half a million inhabitants in 1801.¹⁹ Lisbon’s population was 350,000.²⁰ Vienna had a population of 252,000.²¹ Berlin had barely poked above 200,000 by 1819.²² Madrid was home to 156,670.²³ The population of Brussels in 1802 was 66,297. Budapest had a population of just 61,000.²⁴

人们很容易认为大城市的发展直接与人口增长有关。但事实并非如此。地球上的每个人都可以挤进德克萨斯州，每个家庭都住在带院子的独立式住宅中，这样还能剩下一些德克萨斯州的土地。正如阿德娜·韦伯在经典研究《十九世纪城市的发展》中所说，人口增长本身并不能解释为什么人们生活在城市而不是分散在乡村。1890 年，孟加拉的人口密度与英格兰差不多。然而，孟加拉的城市人口仅为 4.8%，而英格兰的城市人口为 61.7% ^。25

There is an obvious temptation to think that the growth of big cities is a direct function of population growth. But this is not necessarily so. Every human on earth could be packed into Texas, with each family living in its own detached house with a yard, and still have some of Texas left over. As Adna Weber argued in the classic study The Growth of Cities in the Nineteenth Century, population growth alone does not explain why people live in urban settings rather than dispersed in the countryside. In 1890, Bengal had about the same population density as England. Yet Bengal’s urban population was just 4.8 percent, while England’s was 61.7 percent.²⁵

历史上，城市与乡村之间都建有城墙，以阻挡劫掠者和下层阶级。19 世纪和 20 世纪工业就业的增长催生了大城市。如今，随着工业化开始衰落，大城市变得极易崩溃。这一发展趋势的完美标志就是底特律，它是 20 世纪中期领先的工业城市。曾经，世界工业产出的很大一部分都经过底特律。如今，它只剩下一个空壳，犯罪和混乱肆虐。在底特律市中心的许多街区，一栋或多栋废弃的建筑被烧毁或拆除，给人的印象是这座城市在二战轰炸机的一系列袭击中幸存了下来。

Historically, cities were walled off from the countryside to keep marauders and the lower classes out. The growth of industrial employment in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries created big cities. Now the big city has become highly vulnerable to breakdown as industrialism has begun, to fade. The perfect marker of this development is Detroit, the leading industrial city of the mid-twentieth century. At one time, a large fraction of the world’s industrial output passed through Detroit. Now it is a hollowed-out shell, ridden by crime and disorder. In many blocks of downtown Detroit, one or more derelict buildings have been burned to the ground or torn down, leaving the impression that the city has survived a series of raids by World War II bombers.

底特律提醒我们，许多工业城市不再可行。随着信息和创意成为赋予价值的更重要因素，而不是利用自然资源进行制造，它们将逐渐瓦解。在许多情况下，大城市已经变得太大，无法支撑自己的重量。要保持大都市的运转，需要大量支持系统在大规模情况下有效运作。数百万人的聚集意味着犯罪、破坏和随机暴力的脆弱性大幅增加。在工业时代，大规模生产经济偿还了针对这些风险的警务成本。

Detroit stands as a reminder that many industrial cities are no longer viable. They will crumble away as information and ideas become more important factors imparting value than fabricating from natural resources. In many cases, the large city has already grown too large to support its own weight. To keep a metropolis functioning requires that a substantial number of support systems operate effectively at large scale. The very crowding together of millions of people implies a huge jump in vulnerability to crime, sabotage, and random violence. During the industrial era, the price of policing against these risks was repaid by the high-scale economies of production.

在信息时代，只有通过提供高品质生活来偿还维护成本的城市才能保持活力。远方的人将不再有义务补贴城市。衡量城市活力的一个很好的标志是居住在城市核心的人是否比居住在城市边缘的人更富有。在南本德、路易斯维尔和费城的最后一家好餐馆关门之后，布宜诺斯艾利斯、伦敦和巴黎仍将是吸引人居住和做生意的地方。

In the Information Age, only cities that repay their upkeep costs by offering a high quality of life will remain viable. Persons at a distance will no longer be obliged to subsidize them. A good marker for the viability of cities is whether those living at the core of the city are richer than those on its periphery. Buenos Aires, London, and Paris will remain inviting places to live and do business long after the last good restaurant closes in South Bend, Louisville, and Philadelphia.

国家

Country States

一些城邦可能只是没有城市附属的飞地。或许，把它们视为村庄国家或乡村国家会更好。

Some city-states may prove to be merely enclaves with no cities attached. Perhaps they might be better thought of as village states or country states.

自然资源禀赋的价值也会有所不同。当你可以在任何地方做生意时，你很可能会选择在在一个美丽的地方，你可以深呼吸而不会吸入过多的致癌污染物。通信技术可以最大限度地减少语言障碍，这将使人们更容易在几乎任何环境宜人的地方生活。人口稀少、气候温和、人均耕地面积大的地区，如新西兰和阿根廷，也将享有比较优势，因为它们享有高标准的公共卫生，并且是低成本的食品和可再生产品生产国。随着东亚和拉丁美洲数十亿人的生活水平提高，这些产品的需求将增加。

Natural resource endowments will be valued in different ways as well. When you can do business anywhere, you may well choose to do business in a beautiful place where you can breathe deeply without inhaling too much carcinogenic pollution. Communications technologies that minimize language difficulties will make it ever easier to abide almost anywhere that the environment is attractive. Thinly populated regions with temperate climates, and a large endowment of arable land per head, like New Zealand and Argentina, will also enjoy a comparative advantage because they enjoy high standards of public health and are low-cost producers of foods and renewable products. Such products will benefit from increased demand as the living standards of billions of people in East Asia and Latin America rise.

不等价定理

The Inequivalence Theorem

经济学家对行为的许多假设都根植于地点专制。一个明显的例子是李嘉图的“等价定理”，该定理表明，一个存在巨额赤字的国家的公民将调整他们的预期，以预期未来需要更高的税率来偿还债务。从这个意义上讲，通过税收和债务来融资支出之间存在“等价性”。至少在李嘉图写作的十九世纪初存在这样的等价性。然而，在信息时代，理性的人不会通过增加储蓄率来应对通过增加税收来弥补赤字的前景；他会转移住所，或在其他地方进行交易。出于与生产商在供应商之间寻找最低成本的相同原因，他们将更有动力寻找替代的保护供应商。这样做的好处将使转向新的塑料管供应商所实现的利润相形见绌。可以预见的结果是，主权个人和其他理性人将逃离拥有巨额无偿债务的司法管辖区。

Many of the assumptions of economists about behavior are rooted in the tyranny of place. A distinct example is Ricardo’s “Equivalence Theorem,” which suggests that citizens in a country that runs huge deficits will adjust their expectations in anticipation of higher tax rates needed in the future to retire the debt. In this sense, there is an “equivalence” between financing spending by taxation and through debt. At least there was such an equivalence in the early nineteenth century when Ricardo wrote. In the Information Age, however, the rational person will not respond to the prospect of higher taxes to fund deficits by increasing his savings rate; he will transfer his domicile, or lodge his transactions elsewhere. For the same reason that producers sort among suppliers in search of the lowest costs, they will be even more strongly motivated to seek alternative suppliers of protection. The benefits of doing so will dwarf the margins to be realized by shifting to a new supplier of plastic tubes. The result to be expected is that Sovereign Individuals and other rational people will flee jurisdictions with large unfunded liabilities.

廉价政府负债较少，对消费者施加的成本较低，将成为信息时代创造财富的首选之地。这意味着在负债率低且政府已经重组的地区开展业务的前景更具吸引力，例如新西兰、阿根廷、智利、秘鲁、新加坡以及亚洲和拉丁美洲的其他地区。与北美和西欧未经改革、成本高昂的经济体相比，这些地区也将成为开展业务的优越平台。

Cheap governments that have few liabilities and impose low costs on customers will be the domiciles of choice for wealth creation in the Information Age. This implies much more attractive prospects for doing business in areas where indebtedness is low and governments have already been restructured, such as New Zealand, Argentina, Chile, Peru, Singapore, and other parts of Asia and Latin America. These areas will also be superior platforms for doing business to unreformed, high-cost economies in North America and Western Europe.

当地价格异常现象的侵蚀

The Erosion of Local Price Anomalies

信息成本的大幅降低将消除大部分本地定价优势。买家不仅能够浏览大量商店以寻找可交易商品的最低价格；他们还能够使用远程服务跨越司法管辖区进行购物。这将让人们能够更轻松地比较难以分析的产品（如保险）的特征。而且它将绕过当地许可程序施加的贸易限制。因此，在任何可以通过更多信息和竞争消除当地价格异常的领域，利润率都可能下降。

Greatly reduced information costs will obviate most local pricing advantages. Not only will buyers be able to scan an immense number of outlets in search of the lowest prices on tradable goods; they will also be able to employ remote services to shop across jurisdictional boundaries. This will allow people to much more easily compare features of difficult-to-analyze products like insurance. And it will bypass restraints of trade imposed by local licensing procedures. Consequently, profit margins are likely to fall in any field where local price anomalies can be eroded by additional information and competition.

新的组织要求​​

NEW ORGANIZATIONAL IMPERATIVES

网络经济与工业经济在参与者互动方式上将有显著不同。信息技术将使企业因高交易和信息成本而产生的许多长期组织优势化为乌有。信息时代将是“虚拟公司”的时代。

The cybereconomy will significantly differ from the industrial economy in the way its participants interact. Information technology will dissipate many of the long-term organizational advantages of firms that arise from high transaction and information costs. The Information Age will be the age of the “virtual corporation.”

许多比我们更了解信息技术的分析师完全没有意识到，信息技术注定会改变经济组织的逻辑。新技术不仅超越了边界和障碍，还彻底改变了计算的“内部”成本。即使是少数不会因信息和通信技术的进步而受到更激烈的跨境竞争影响的企业，也将面临新的组织要求。信息和交易成本的快速下降将决定性地降低规模经济，使工业化时期许多促成长寿企业和职业就业的激励措施失效。

Many analysts more knowledgable than we are about information technology have utterly failed to see that it is destined to transform the logic of economic organization. Not only does the new technology transcend borders and barriers; it also revolutionizes the “internal” costs of computation. Even the few businesses that will not be affected by exposure to greater cross-border competition because of improving information and communication technology will be exposed to new organizational imperatives. Rapidly falling information and transaction costs will decisively lower economies to scale, voiding many of the incentives that gave rise to long-lived firms and career employment during the industrial period.

为什么是公司？

Why Firms?

亚当·斯密等古典经济学家几乎对企业规模问题保持沉默。他们没有解决什么影响了企业的最佳规模，为什么企业会采取这种形式，甚至企业存在的原因。为什么企业家要雇佣员工，而不是把每一项需要完成的任务都交给拍卖市场上的独立承包商来竞标？诺贝尔经济学奖得主罗纳德·科斯通过提出其中一些重要问题，帮助开辟了经济学的新方向。他帮助构建的答案暗示了信息技术对商业结构的革命性影响。科斯认为，企业是克服信息赤字和高交易成本的有效方式^。26

The classical economists like Adam Smith were almost silent on the question of firm size. They did not address what influences the optimal size of firms, why firms take the form they do, or even why firms exist at all. Why do entrepreneurs hire employees, rather than placing every task that needs doing out to bid among independent contractors in the auction market? Nobel Prize-winning economist Ronald Coase helped launch a new direction in economics by asking some of these important questions. The answers he helped to frame hint at the revolutionary consequences of information technology for the structure of business. Coase argued that firms were an efficient way to overcome information deficits and high transaction costs.²⁶

信息和交易成本

Information and Transaction Costs

要了解原因，请考虑一下在没有一家公司协调其活动的情况下尝试运营工业时代装配线时会面临的障碍。原则上，一辆汽车可以在没有生产的情况下生产出来集中于一家公司的监督之下。经济学家奥利弗·威廉姆森和科斯是另一位发展企业理论的先驱。威廉姆森定义了六种不同的运营和控制方法。其中包括“企业家模式”，即“每个工作站都由专家拥有和运营” ^。27另一种是威廉姆森所说的“联合工作站”，其中“中间产品由每个工人跨阶段转移”。28^没有任何物理原因不能用一群独立承包商取代数千名员工，每个承包商都在工厂车间租用空间，竞标零件，并提出组装车轴或将挡泥板焊接到底盘。然而，你找不到一个由独立承包商组织和运营的工业时代汽车工厂的例子。

To see why, consider the obstacles you would have faced in trying to operate an industrial-era assembly line without a single firm to coordinate its activities. In principle, an automobile could have been produced without production being centralized under the oversight of a single firm. Economist Oliver Williamson, along with Coase, is another pioneer in developing the theory of the firm. Williamson defined six different methods of operation and control. Among them is the “entrepreneurial mode,” “wherein each workstation is owned and operated by a specialist.”²⁷ Another is what Williamson calls the “federated workstations” in which “an intermediate product is transferred across stages by each worker.”²⁸ There is no physical reason why the thousands of employees could not have been replaced by a gaggle of independent contractors, each renting space on the factory floor, bidding for parts, and offering to assemble the axle or weld the fenders onto the chassis. Yet you would look in vain for an example of an industrial-era automobile factory organized and run by independent contractors.

协调问题

Coordination Problems

如果一家企业无法通过单一公司进行协调，那么大规模运营所能实现的大部分经济效益将化为泡影。协调由众多小公司组成的拼凑物时产生的大量交易问题将使装配线失去自动化。要使这种系统发挥作用，就需要各个承包商之间不停地进行谈判。众多承包商或企业家将不得不将时间和注意力转移到确定零部件价格和制定不断变化的互动条款上，而不是专注于生产。仅仅监控生产就会是一个难题。

Operating an industrial facility without the benefit of coordination through a single firm would have dissipated most of the economies to be realized by operating on a large scale. Massive transaction problems in coordinating a patchwork quilt of small firms would have effectively deautomated the assembly line. To work at all, such a system would have necessitated nonstop negotiation among the individual contractors. Instead of focusing on production, the multitude of contractors or entrepreneurs would have had to divert time and attention to fixing prices of components and working out the terms of their own constantly changing interactions. Simply monitoring production would have been a difficult problem.

采取行动的权力

The Authority to Act

有这样一组独立组织努力组装汽车，车型的创造和重新设计将是一场噩梦。您只需要想象一下设计师在试图说服数百名独立承包商接受推出新车型所需的更改时所面临的困难。实际上，几乎需要全体一致同意。任何坚持或反对产品规格任何更改的人都可能有效地扼杀车型改进或提高推出车型的成本，从而进一步危及大规模运营的收益。

With such a set of independent organizations struggling to assemble a car, creation and re-engineering of the models would have been a nightmare. You need only imagine the difficulty facing the designer in attempting to convince the hundreds of independent contractors on changes required to introduce a new model. In practice, almost unanimous consent would have been needed. Anyone holding out or objecting to any change in the specification of the product could either have effectively killed the model improvement or raised the cost of introducing it, thus further jeopardizing the gains from operating on a large scale.

不必要的谈判

Unnecessary Negotiation

独立公司租用（或单独拥有）的装配线承包商在单一公司内运营会面临许多弱点，而这些弱点在单一公司内运营可以避免。在需要数千人合作在同一屋檐下生产单一产品的运营中，单个承包商的死亡、疾病或财务失败会是十分常见的情况。拍卖市场当然能够取代这些承包商。但每次继任都需要通过谈判解决，例如由继任者买断前任运营商的股份。还需要就工厂空间的租赁承担达成协议，或许还需要就焊接机或用于冲压尾灯插座的压力机签订新的租赁协议。所有这些都会变得很复杂。

An assembly line rented (or owned separately) by independent contractors would have been subject to numerous vulnerabilities avoided by operating within a single firm. The death, illness, or financial failure of individual contractors would have been an altogether too common occurrence in operations requiring the cooperation of thousands of people to build a single product under one roof. The auction market would certainly have been able to replace these contractors. But each succession would have required a negotiated settlement, such as a buyout of the previous operator by his replacement. It also would have required an agreement on assumption of the rental of the factory space, and perhaps a new lease on the welding machine or the press used for stamping out the taillight sockets. All of this would have been complicated.

激励陷阱

Incentive Traps

在工业时代的条件下，独立承包商的装配线面临的另一个关键困难是，各个承包商的资本需求会有很大差异。例如，生产仪表盘开关所需的塑料模具可能相对便宜，而铸造发动机缸体或冲压挡泥板上的金属板所需的设备可能要花费数百万美元。装配线生产的高资源含量和连续性使得高资本成本带来的问题不可避免，原因已在上一章中分析过。从事资本密集型任务的承包商本质上依赖于其他人的合作来摊销他们的投资。资本需求较高的承包商筹集资金并盈利的能力将取决于他们能否获得流程中许多其他参与者的合作，而这些参与者的资本成本要低得多。在许多情况下，他们得不到合作。

Another crucial difficulty with an assembly line of independent contractors under the conditions of the Industrial Age was that capital requirements for the individual contractors would have differed dramatically. A plastic mold needed to produce a dashboard switch, for example, might have been relatively cheap, while the equipment needed to cast an engine block or stamp out the sheet metal on a fender could have cost millions. The high resource content and sequential nature of assembly-line production made problems arising from high capital costs inevitable, for reasons analyzed in the last chapter. Contractors with, capital-intensive tasks would have essentially been dependent upon the cooperation of others to amortize their investments. The ability of the contractors with higher capital requirements to raise money and operate at a profit would have depended upon their securing the cooperation of many other participants in the process whose capital costs were far lower. In many cases, they would not have gotten it.

小企业剥削大企业的动机会非常强烈。那些在装配线上以较少资金完成特定功能的企业会因为在关键时刻不合作而获益。就像罢工工人一样，他们可能会以这样或那样的借口关闭装配线，这不会给他们自己带来多大损失，但会给那些资本投资较大的企业带来很大的麻烦。生产过程会不断受到博弈，小规模承包商会利用他们阻挠产出的能力，向资本成本较高的企业索要赎金。小承包商通过操纵手段从大企业那里获取私利，会降低系统的效率。

There would have been a substantial incentive for the small to exploit the great. Those who required less money to operate their particular function on the assembly line would have gained by failing to cooperate at crucial times. Like striking workers, they could have closed down the assembly line on one pretext or another, imposing little cost on themselves but much grief to those with larger capital investments. The production process would have been subject to constant gaming, with small-scale contractors exposing those with higher capital costs to ransom through their ability to thwart output. The maneuvering of smaller contractors to extract side payments from the large would have reduced the efficiency of the system.

公司解决方案

The Firm Solution

简而言之，如果将生产分给众多个体承包商，那么工业时代通过大规模运营装配线所实现的许多经济效益就会化为泡影。尽管存在其他局限性，但单一大型公司是克服这些缺点的有效方法。大企业官僚主义严重。但在某种程度上，官僚主义和等级制度正是工业时代所需要的。行政和管理团队监控和协调生产，众多中层管理人员向下层传达命令，并将其他信息反馈给指挥链。公司官僚机构还提供簿记和会计控制，并最大限度地减少委托代理问题，即员工未能以雇用他们的公司的最佳利益行事。在工业时代的条件下，要实现复杂的会计工作需要许多人的努力。建立这样的行政官僚机构成本高昂。无论生产是活跃还是疲软，都必须支付费用。由于这些管理人员掌握了经营企业所必需的关键知识，因此他们的薪酬通常高于他们在现货市场上的技能水平。

In short, many of the economies to be achieved during the industrial era by operating an assembly line on a large scale would have been dissipated if the production had been divided among multitudes of individual contractors. The single large firm was an efficient way of overcoming these drawbacks, notwithstanding its other limitations. Big business was bureaucratic. But to some extent bureaucracy and hierarchy were precisely what were required during the Industrial Age. Administrative and management teams monitored and coordinated production, with numerous middle managers passing orders down the hierarchy and other information back up the chain of command. The corporate bureaucracy also provided bookkeeping and accounting controls and minimized principal-agency problems, in which employees fail to act in the best interest of the firm that employs them. To achieve sophisticated accountancy under conditions of the Industrial Age required the work of many people. Having such an administrative bureaucracy in place was costly. It had to be paid whether production was active or slack. Because such administrators held crucial knowledge necessary to operate the business, they were usually paid a premium above what their skills would have commanded in the spot market.

“组织懈怠”

“Organizational Slack”

大量职业经理人和管理人员的缺点是，他们倾向于“控制”公司，为自己的利益而不是股东的利益而经营公司。例如，在工业时代，公司在办公室家具、俱乐部会员资格和其他福利上大手大脚，这些福利虽然只属于管理层，但可能不会给投资者带来直接回报，这种情况并不罕见。在一个复杂的企业中，不可能轻易地从外部监控哪些管理费用是必要的，哪些是员工的放纵。有时，很难防止相当一部分公司员工偷懒。由于在技术上难以监控绩效，因此需要大量的中层管理人员，但同时也使监控人员的监控变得困难。

The large numbers of professional managers and administrators also had the drawback of tending to “capture” the firm and operate it in their own interests rather than those of the shareholders. It was not uncommon in the industrial era, for example, to find firms spending lavishly on office furnishings, club memberships, and other perks that could be enjoyed by management but that might not have generated a direct return to investors. In a complicated business, it was impossible to easily monitor from the outside which overhead expenditures were essential and which were indulgences for the employees. It was also difficult to prevent a sometimes considerable fraction of corporate employees from shirking. The fact that it was technologically difficult to monitor performance made a large middle management necessary, and at the same time made it difficult to monitor the monitors.

这些条件都导致了所谓的“组织松弛”现象，这一术语由理查德·赛尔特和詹姆斯·马奇于 1963 年在《企业行为理论》中提出。29^仔细的研究表明，许多实际企业的表现远远未达到其潜力。

These conditions all contributed to what became known as “organizational slack,” a term coined in 1963 by Richard Cyert and James March in A Behavioral Theory of the Firm.²⁹ Careful examination suggested that numerous real firms were underperforming their potential substantially.

“无论你是否取得成果，报酬都是一样的。

“无论你努力工作与否，报酬都是一样的。

“不管你介意与否，报酬都是一样的。” ³⁰

—C HRIS D RAY

“Whether you produce results or not, the pay is the same.

“Whether you work hard or not, the pay is the same.

“Whether you care or not, the pay is the same.”³⁰

—CHRIS DRAY

“这不是我的工作”

“That’s Not My Job”

大型工业企业作为一个追求长久发展的实体，存在着我们之前探讨过的缺点，即容易受到工会的敲诈。它还具有一些在政府机构中表现得更为夸张的官僚主义特征。命令来自上层。任务是固定的、分工明确的。这些任务通常有严格的定义。工作类别之间出现了界限，类似于管理学术专业的卡特尔所强制执行的界限。在工业时代，要求簿记员更换桌上台灯中烧坏的灯泡对许多人来说就像请律师帮你治好流感一样奇怪。员工既不被要求跨越严格界定的职能之间的分工界限，在许多情况下甚至不允许跨越。

As an entity aspiring to permanence, the large industrial firm had the drawback we have already explored of being exposed to shakedowns by labor unions. It also shared some of the characteristics of bureaucracy seen in a more exaggerated form in government offices. Orders flowed from on high. Tasks were stereotyped and compartmentalized. These tasks were often rigidly defined. Boundaries emerged among job categories, akin to those enforced by the cartels regulating the learned professions. To have expected a bookkeeper to change a burned-out lightbulb in a lamp on his desk seemed as strange to many during the Industrial Age as calling on a lawyer to help cure your flu. Employees were neither expected, nor in many cases even permitted, to cross the compartmentalized boundaries between rigidly defined functions.

“那不是我的工作”是一句广为流传的口号，它强调了工业时代的“组织懈怠”。每个人的工作都被精确地定义为刻板的任务，无论这些任务可能如何提高生产率，都不能被侵犯。公司官僚机构中的每个员工都是根据被认为可能预测其特定职能表现的“资格”来雇用的。除了少数例外，每个人的工资都是根据工作分类支付的，整个组织的工资或多或少是统一的。由于大企业的行政等级制度中的具体绩效通常没有衡量标准，就像在国家官僚机构中一样，工作进展得非常缓慢。因此，尽管该公司确实获得了大规模生产的规模经济，但它是以其他低效率为代价的。

“That is not my job” was a widely heard slogan that underscored the “organizational slack” of the Industrial Age. Everyone’s job was precisely defined in terms of stereotyped tasks that were not to be trespassed upon, however much that might improve productivity. Each employee in the corporate bureaucracy was hired according to “qualifications” deemed likely to predict performance in his specific function. With few exceptions, everyone was paid based upon a job classification, with more or less uniform pay throughout the organization. Because specific performance in the administrative hierarchies of Big Business often went unmeasured, as in state bureaucracies, work proceeded at a leisurely pace. So while the firm did capture the scale economies of mass production, it did so at the cost of other inefficiencies.

“在市场中，你不会因为别人告诉你做某事或因为战略计划第 30 页列出了某事而去做。市场没有工作界限……没有命令，没有来自高层的信号转换，没有人把工作分拣成小份。在市场中，人们有客户，供应商和客户之间的关系从根本上来说是非组织性的，因为它是两个独立实体之间的关系。” ³¹

—威廉·布里奇斯

“In a market, you don’t do something because somebody tells you to or because it is listed on page thirty of the strategic plan. A market has no job boundaries.… There are no orders, no translation of signals from on high, no one sorting out the work into parcels. In a market one has customers, and the relationship between a supplier and a customer is fundamentally nonorganizational, because it is between two independent entities.”³¹

—WILLIAM BRIDGES

新要求

New Imperatives

信息时代的新政治环境将显著改变商业组织的逻辑。部分原因显而易见。信息技术即使不做其他事情，也会大大降低处理成本，计算机和信息分析技术的发展使企业能够更有效地计算和分析信息。这种技术的一个作用是减少了雇用大量中层管理人员来监控生产过程的必要性。事实上，先进计算能力带来的自动化机床在许多情况下正在取代计时工。在生产过程仍需要人工的情况下，控制和协调过程已基本实现自动化。装有微处理器的设备可以比管理人员更有效地监控装配线的进度。新设备不仅可以测量人们工作的速度和准确性，还可以自动编制账目，并在零件从库存中取出时重新订购。现在，最小的运营机构也能负担得起财务控制程序，这些程序比几十年前最大的公司通过生产层级所能实现的速度和复杂程度都要高。

The new megapolitical conditions of the Information Age will significantly alter the logic of business organization. Part of this is obvious. If information technology does nothing else, it dramatically lowers the cost of processing, computing, and analyzing information. One effect of such technology is to reduce the necessity of hiring large numbers of middle managers to monitor production processes. Indeed, automated machine tools made possible by advanced computational power are in many cases replacing hourly workers. And where the production process continues to be manned, the control and coordination process has largely been automated. Equipment fitted with microprocessors can monitor the progress of the assembly line much more effectively than managers ever could. Not only can the new equipment measure the speed and accuracy with which people work, it can also automatically compile accounts, and reorder components the moment they are taken out of inventory. The smallest operations can now afford financial control programs that account for their finances with greater speed and sophistication than even the largest corporations could have achieved through their production hierarchies a few decades ago.

我们已经探讨过，信息技术可以实现分散、非连续的产品输出，减少自然资源含量，从而大大降低了受欺诈和勒索的风险。然而，这些并不是信息技术使将以前由员工完成的职能外包出去更具吸引力的唯一特征。资本成本更低。产品周期更短。独立承包商本身（包括一人公司）拥有更为复杂的信息网络。很快，他们将能够依靠一系列数字仆人来执行各种各样的办公职能，从接听电话到秘书服务。数字仆人将是秘书、广告代理、旅行社、银行出纳员和官僚。

The fact that information technology allows for dispersed, nonsequential output of products with reduced natural resource content dramatically reduces the vulnerability to gaming and extortion, as we have already explored. However, these are not the only characteristics of information technology that make it ever more attractive to contract out functions formerly done by employees. Capital costs are lower. Product cycles are shorter. The independent contractors themselves, including the one-person firms, have vastly more sophisticated information networks at their disposal. Soon they will be able to rely upon an array of digital servants to perform a wide variety of office functions, from answering the phone to secretarial services. Digital servants will be secretaries, advertising agents, travel agents, bank tellers, and bureaucrats.

好工作的消失

The Disappearance of Good Jobs

能够创造重大经济价值的个人将越来越能够为自己保留他们所创造的大部分价值。以前吸收了企业主要收入创造者所创造的大部分收入的支持人员将被低成本的自动化代理和信息系统所取代。这意味着，通过外包，组织将能够更好地确保自己提供最高质量的服务，而不是将职能保留在公司内部，因为在公司内部，奖励出色完成任务的个人会相对困难。虚拟公司将通过取消组织来消除大多数“组织懈怠”。

To an increasing degree, individuals capable of creating significant economic value will be able to retain most of the value they create for themselves. Support staff that previously absorbed a large part of the revenue generated by the principal income creators in an enterprise will be replaced by low-cost automated agents and information systems. This implies that an organization will be better able to assure itself of the highest quality of service by contracting it out, rather than by keeping the function within the firm, where it will be relatively more difficult to reward individuals for performing a task well. A virtual corporation will eliminate most “organizational slack” by eliminating the organization.

“好工作”将成为过去。正如普林斯顿大学经济学家奥利·阿什费尔特所说，“好工作”是一份薪水超过你价值的工作。32^在工业时代，许多“好工作”的存在是因为高信息和交易成本。公司规模不断扩大，并将更广泛的职能内化，因为这样做可以让它们获得规模经济。税法也为企业膨胀提供了补贴。工业时代后期占主导地位的高税收人为地放大了成立一家长期公司和雇用长期雇员的优势。在大多数国家，税法和法规大大提高了以项目为基础成立和解散公司的成本。它们还倾向于迫使企业家将独立承包商纳入雇员行列。法律干预进一步暂时增加了“好工作”的供应，因为解雇员工的成本高昂且困难重重，无论他对公司的生产力贡献有多小。

“Good jobs” will be a thing of the past. A “good job,” as Princeton economist Orly Ashenfelter put it, “is a job that pays more than you are worth.”³² In the Industrial Age, many “good jobs” existed because of high information and transaction costs. Firms grew bigger and internalized a wider range of functions because doing so allowed them to capture scale economies. Corporate bloat was also subsidized by tax laws. The high taxes that predominated in the late stages of the industrial era artificially magnified the advantages of forming a long-lived firm and hiring permanent employees. In most nations, tax laws and regulations substantially raised the costs of forming and dissolving firms on a project basis. They also have tended to force entrepreneurs to subsume independent contractors as employees. Legal interventions further temporarily inflated the supply of “good jobs” by making it costly and difficult to dismiss an employee, however little he might be contributing to the productivity of the firm.

工业时代商业组织的特征必然会导致那些为组织创造不成比例增值的最熟练和最有才华的人所获得的报酬低于他们所做贡献的价值。这种情况将在信息时代发生改变。

Inevitably and logically, the character of business organization in the industrial era assured that the most highly skilled and talented people who created a disproportionate share of the value-added in an organization were paid proportionately less than their contribution was worth. This will change in the Information Age.

微处理革命正在大幅提高信息的可用性并降低交易成本。这正在使公司权力下放。公司将不再采用永久性的官僚机构，而是围绕项目来组织活动，这与电影公司目前的运作方式非常相似。公司以前大部分“内部”职能将外包给独立承包商。工业时代的员工拥有“好工作”，但贡献不大，并依赖同事为他们“掩护”，他们很快就会发现自己在现货市场上竞标合同。许多忠诚、勤奋的员工也是如此。“好工作”将成为一种过时的东西，因为一般的工作都将过时。

The microprocessing revolution is sharply increasing the availability of information and reducing transaction costs. This is devolving the firm. Instead of permanent bureaucracy, activities will be organized around projects, in much the way that movie companies already operate. Most of the formerly “internal” functions of the firm will be outsourced to independent contractors. The industrial-era employees who held “good jobs” but who contributed little and relied upon fellow workers to “cover” for them will soon find themselves bidding for contracts in the spot market. And so will many loyal, diligent employees. “Good jobs” will be an anachronism because jobs in general will be anachronistic.

在日本大公司中，员工们希望终生工作。即使他们没有生产任务可做，他们也会被留用，有时只是坐在“工厂角落里一张光秃秃的办公桌前”。现在，即使在日本，臃肿的白领劳动力也在缩减。《国际先驱论坛报》的一篇报道的标题讲述了这个故事：“离别是如此悲伤：日本终身工作文化痛苦地消亡。” ³³

In the extreme case of big Japanese corporations, employees expected to have a job for life. Even where they had no productive task to perform, they would be retained, sometimes merely showing up to sit at “a bare desk in the corner of a factory.” Now even in Japan, the bloated white-collar workforce is being downsized. The headline of a story in the International Herald-Tribune told the tale: “Parting Is Such Sour Sorrow: Japan’s Job-for-Life Culture Painfully Expires.”³³

在后工业时代，工作将是你所做的事情，而不是你“拥有”的东西。在工业时代之前，永久性就业几乎不为人知。正如威廉·布里奇斯所说，“在 1800 年之前——以及在很多情况下之后的很长时间——工作总是指某项特定的任务或工作，而不是组织中的角色或职位。……在 1700 年至 1890 年间，牛津英语词典发现诸如“工作马车夫”、“工作医生”和“工作园丁”等术语的许多用法——都指一次性雇用的人。工作（另一个常用术语）是临时工作，而不是固定工作。” ³⁴在信息时代，以前被捕获的大多数任务为减少信息和交易成本而从企业内部转移的外包方式将重新回归现货市场。由于信息技术的发展，“即时”库存控制和外包都变得切实可行。它们是走向工作消亡的几个步骤。AT&T 等大公司已经取消了所有永久性工作类别。这家大公司的职位现在是临时性的。用布里奇斯的话来说，“就业再次变得临时和情境化，类别正在失去界限。” ³⁵在新的网络经济中，“独立承包商”将跨洲远程办公，在信息时代的装配线上共事。

In the postindustrial period, jobs will be tasks you do, not something you “have.” Before the industrial era, permanent employment was almost unknown. As William Bridges put it, “Before 1800—and long after in many cases—job always referred to some particular task or undertaking, never to a role or position in an organization.… Between 1700 and 1890, the Oxford English Dictionary finds many uses of terms like job-coachman, job-doctor, and job-gardener—all referring to people hired on a one-time basis. Job-work (another frequent term) was occasional work, not regular employment.”³⁴ In the Information Age, most tasks that were formerly captured within firms as an expedient to reduce information and transaction costs will migrate back to the spot market. “Just in time” inventory control and outsourcing are both practical because of information technology. They are steps toward the death of jobs. Already, major corporations such as AT&T have eliminated all permanent job categories. Positions in that large firm are now contingent. In Bridges’s words, “Employment is becoming temporary and situational again, and categories are losing their boundaries.”³⁵ In the new cybereconomy, “independent contractors” will telecommute across continents to nest together on the Information Age equivalent of the assembly line.

好莱坞接管

Hollywood Takes Over

新信息经济的典型商业组织可能是电影制作公司。这样的企业可能非常复杂，预算高达数亿美元。虽然它们通常规模庞大，但本质上也是临时性的。一家制作一部耗资 1 亿美元的电影的电影公司可能会成立一年，然后解散。虽然参与制作的人很有才华，但他们并不认为在这个项目上找到工作就等于拥有一份“永久工作”。项目结束后，灯光师、摄影师、音响师和服装师将各奔东西。他们可能会在另一个项目中重聚，也可能不会。

The model business organization of the new information economy may be a movie production company. Such enterprises can be very sophisticated, with budgets of hundreds of millions of dollars. While they are often large operations, they are also temporary in nature. A movie company producing a film for $100 million may come together for a year and then dissolve. While the people who work on the production are talented, they have no expectation that finding work on the project is equivalent to having a “permanent job.” When the project is over, the lighting technicians, cameramen, sound engineers, and wardrobe specialists will go their separate ways. They may be reunited in another project, or they may not.

随着规模经济的下降，以及多种信息密集型活动的资本需求同时下降，企业将有强烈的解散动机。商业运作将更加临时和短暂。企业将趋向于更短暂。为特定目的而聚集人才的虚拟公司将比长期存在的公司更有效率。随着加密的普及和竞争迫使资本税下降，维持“永久”企业存在的人造规模经济将会消失。无论税收是迅速减少还是缓慢减少，这种情况都会发生。如果迅速减少，以项目为基础运作的人造成本将更快消失。如果缓慢减少，支付不合时宜的高额税收的主要负担将落在现有企业身上，而新企业将以虚拟公司的形式运营，使它们能够更好地摆脱垂死民族国家施加的昂贵负担。

As scale economies fall, and capital requirements for many types of information-intensive activities fall simultaneously, there will be a strong incentive for firms to dissolve. Business operations will be more ad hoc and temporary. Firms will tend to be more short-lived. Virtual corporations that assemble talents for specific purposes will be more efficient than long-standing companies. As encryption becomes widespread and the taxation of capital is forced down by competition, artificial scale economies that sustain the existence of “permanent” firms will fall away. This will happen whether taxes are reduced rapidly or slowly. If rapidly, the artificial costs of functioning on a project basis will disappear more quickly. If slowly, the main burden of paying the anachronistically high taxes will fall upon existing firms, while new enterprises will operate as virtual corporations, better enabling them to escape costly burdens imposed by the dying nation-state.

虽然特殊技能和才能在信息经济中比以往任何时候都更加重要，但职业之间的大多数人为界限将会消失。先进的信息和检索存储技术将使法律、医学和会计等行业的商业秘密和专业信息可供任何人获取。记忆作为一种技能的重要性将会下降，而综合和创造性地应用信息的重要性将会上升。

While special skills and talents will be more important than ever in the information economy, most of the artificial boundaries between professions will dissolve. Advanced information and retrieval storage technologies will make the trade secrets and specialized information of professions such as law, medicine, and accounting available to anyone. The economic value of memorization as a skill will fall, while the importance of synthesis and creative application of information will rise.

过时的监管将阻碍这一变化的全面影响。但从长远来看，政府监管网络经济的权力将逐渐消失。任何针对专业垄断的人工监管最终都会被忽视，因为这些监管只会提高成本，而不会带来市场认可的收益。

The full implications of this change will be retarded by antiquated regulation. But over the longer term, the power of governments to regulate the cybereconomy will wither to the vanishing point. Any artificial regulation of professional monopolies that raises costs without benefits that are valued in the market will ultimately be ignored.

向信息经济的转变还有其他影响：

There are other implications of the shift to an information economy:

• 施加更高成本的地方法规将转变为市场基础。
• Local regulations that impose higher costs will be transformed to a market footing.
• 各个司法管辖区之间将展开激烈竞争，争夺高附加值活动的注册地，而这些活动原则上可以设在任何地方。没有哪个注册地比下一个更有吸引力。
• There will be intensified competition among jurisdictions to domicile high value-added activities that in principle could be located anywhere. No stopping place is necessarily more compelling than the next.
• 商业关系将倾向于依赖“信任圈”。由于加密技术的存在，个人可以偷窃而不被发现，因此诚实将成为商业伙伴更受重视的特质。
• Business relations will gravitate toward reliance upon “circles of trust.” Due to encryption, which gives individuals an ability to steal undetected, honesty will be a more highly valued characteristic of business associates.
• 由于某些信息的获取变得容易，专利和版权制度将发生变化。
• Patent and copyright regimes will change, due to ease of access to certain information.
• 保护将越来越技术化，而非法律化。下层阶级将被隔离。迁入封闭社区几乎是不可避免的。在中央权力薄弱的时代，将闹事者隔离是一种有效且传统的减少犯罪暴力的方法。
• Protection will become increasingly technological rather than juridical. The lower classes will be walled out. The move to gated communities is all but inevitable. Walling out troublemakers is an effective as well as traditional way of minimizing criminal violence in times of weak central authority.
• 大宗商品将被征收重税，并在当地运输，就像中世纪那样，而奢侈品将被征收轻税，并运往很远的地方^。36
• Bulk goods will be heavily taxed and shipped locally, as in the Middle Ages, while luxury goods will be lightly taxed and shipped a great distance.³⁶
• 警察职能将越来越多地由与商人协会相关的私人保安承担。
• Police functions will increasingly be taken up by private guards linked to merchant associations.
• 私营企业可能比上市公司具有过渡优势，因为私营企业在逃避政府施加的成本方面享有更大的回旋余地。
• There may be a transitional advantage to private over publicly traded firms because private firms will enjoy greater leeway in escaping costs imposed by governments.
• 随着“工作”越来越成为任务或“计件工作”而不是组织内的职位，终身雇佣制将会消失。
• Lifetime employment will disappear as “jobs” increasingly become tasks or “piece work” rather than positions within an organization.
• 随着通过在产品中融入知识来创造财富变得越来越容易，经济资源的控制权将从国家转移到拥有高超技能和智慧的人身上。
• Control over economic resources will shift away from the state to persons of superior skills and intelligence, as it becomes increasingly easy to create wealth by adding knowledge to products.
• 许多专业的知识分子将被交互式信息检索系统所取代。
• Many members of learned professions will be displaced by interactive information-retrieval systems.
• 智力较低人群将出现新的生存策略，包括更加注重发展休闲技能、运动能力、以及犯罪，以及随着管辖范围内收入不平等的加剧而为越来越多的主权个人提供服务。
• New survival strategies for persons of lower intelligence will evolve, involving greater concentration on development of leisure skills, sports abilities, and crime, as well as service to the growing numbers of Sovereign Individuals as income inequality within jurisdictions rises.

在暴力事件不断增加的时代成长起来的政治制度必须经历痛苦的​​调整。如今，相对于制度所掌握的权力大小，效率的重要性日益增加，小型、高效的主权国家将越来越具有可持续性，因为这些主权国家能以较低的成本为其客户提供更多的保护。

Political systems that grew up at a time when there were rising returns to violence must undergo wrenching adjustments. Now that efficiency is growing in importance relative to the magnitude of power commanded by a system, small, efficient sovereignties, which produce more protection for their customers at lower cost, will be increasingly sustainable.

就像中世纪一样，暴力组织的规模不经济现象再次出现。共产主义垮台以来主权实体数量的增加已经反映了这一点。我们预计，随着信息时代的逻辑得到经验的证实，世界上的主权实体数量将迅速增加。

As in the medieval period, there are once again growing diseconomies of scale in the organization of violence. This is already reflected in the growing number of sovereign entities since the fall of Communism. We expect the number of sovereignties in the world to multiply rapidly as the logic of the Information Age is confirmed by experience.

权力将再次在小范围内行使。飞地和省份甚至可能发现，它们在向“客户”提供主权服务的竞争性条件方面比跨洲国家具有巨大优势。这将与迅速消亡的现代时期截然不同，在现代时期，除非能够控制足以控制一个王国的军事力量，否则任何实体都无法生存。在过去，当行使权力时存在规模不经济时，那些从保护中获益最多的人，比如中世纪晚期城邦的富商，确实控制着政府。在我们看来，你可以再次期待这样的事情。掠夺性负担的降低和资源的更高效配置应该会导致客户确实控制当地主权的地区快速增长。

Power will once again be exercised on a small scale. Enclaves and provinces may even find that they have substantial advantages over nations spanning continents in offering competitive terms to their “customers” for sovereignty services. This will be very different from the rapidly dying modern period, in which no entity could survive unless it could control military force sufficient to control a kingdom. In the past, when there were diseconomies of scale in exercising power, those who benefited most from the protection, like the wealthy merchants in the late medieval city-states, did control the government. In our view, you can look for something like this again. The lowering of predatory burdens and more efficient disposition of resources should result in rapid growth in areas where customers do exercise control over the local sovereignties.

我们接下来将探讨的是，这些发展是否能够或应该在大批失败者的反对下继续进行，这将成为信息时代最重要的争议之一。

As we explore next, whether these developments can or should proceed in the face of opposition from legions of losers will be among the more important controversies of the Information Age.

第九章民族主义、反动派和新卢德派

CHAPTER 9 NATIONALISM, REACTION, AND THE NEW LUDDITES

“当然，民族主义本质上是荒谬的。为什么出生为美国人、阿尔巴尼亚人、苏格兰人或斐济岛民这一偶然事件——无论是幸运还是不幸——会强加忠诚，主宰个人生活，构建一个社会，使其与他人发生正式冲突？在过去，人们有对地方、氏族和部落的忠诚，对领主或地主的义务，对王朝或领土战争的忠诚，但主要的忠诚是对宗教、上帝或神王、可能是对皇帝的忠诚，对文明本身的忠诚。没有国家。有对祖国、父辈土地的依恋，或爱国主义，但在现代之前谈论民族主义是不合时宜的。 ” ¹

—威廉· P·法夫

“Nationalism, of course, is intrinsically absurd. Why should the accident—fortune or misfortune—of birth as an American, Albanian, Scot, or Fiji Islander impose loyalties that dominate an individual life and structure a society so as to place it in formal conflict with others? In the past there were local loyalties to place and clan and tribe, obligations, to lord or landlord, dynastic or territorial wars, but primary loyalties were to religion, God or god-king, possibly to emperor, to a civilization as such. There was no nation. There was attachment to patria, land of one’s fathers, or patriotism, but to speak of nationalism before modern times is anachronistic.”¹

—WILLIAM PFAFF

http://www.ibm.com说“世界越来越小”是一种形象的比喻，IBM 广告代理等权威机构也支持这一说法。他们为互联网制作的“小星球的解决方案”多元文化广告提醒体育迷们，他们自己可能没有意识到，技术已经改变了分散在各地的司法管辖区的个人关系。我们引用了著名历史学家威廉·麦克尼尔的脚注，以了解其含义。他写道：“通信和交通的不断加强，并没有有利于国家统一，反而开始起到相反的作用，因为其范围超越了现有的政治和种族界限。” ²随着世界“变得越来越小”，通信的改善，偶然的、“本质上荒谬的”国家主张和民族主义主张注定会削弱。

http://www.ibm.com To say that the “world is getting smaller” is an informing figure of speech, reinforced by authorities as prestigious as IBM’s advertising agency. Their “Solutions for a small planet” multicultural commercials for the Internet remind sports fans who may fail to realize it on their own that the terms of relations between individuals in widely dispersed jurisdictions have been changed by technology. We refer to the distinguished historian William McNeill for a useful footnote on the implications. He writes, “Continuing intensification of communications and transport, instead of favoring national consolidation, has begun to work in a contrary sense, inasmuch as its range transcends existing political and ethnic boundaries.”² As the world “becomes smaller” and communications improve, the accidental and “intrinsically absurd” claims of nations and nationalism are bound to weaken.

大转型​​​​

THE GREAT TRANSFORMATION

这种合理预期的问题在于，所有以往的历史都表明，这种预期无法得到合理的满足。它所暗示的转变将带来危机。它需要一种全新的思维方式，一种超越民族主义和民族国家的新的社区想象。正如迈克尔·比利格所强调的那样，“我们对民族身份以及对民族归属感的自然性的信念”是“特定历史时代的产物”。3那个时代，即现代时代，可能已经不复存在。它的主要机构——民族国家——仍然存在，但它们在一个被侵蚀的基础之上岌岌可危地生存着。随着另一只^鞋子掉下来，民族国家崩溃，我们预计会出现令人讨厌的反应，特别是在那些富裕国家，这些国家在 20 世纪的“国民经济”为非技术工人带来了高收入。

The trouble with this reasonable expectation is that all previous history suggests that it cannot be accommodated in a reasonable way. The transition it implies will involve a crisis. It entails a radically new way of thinking, a new imagining of community that moves beyond nationalism and the nation-state. As Michael Billig has highlighted, “our beliefs about nationhood, and about the naturalness of belonging to a nation,” are “the products of a particular historical age.”³ That age, the Modern Age, may already be defunct. Its predominant institutions, nation-states, still endure, but they survive precariously upon an eroded foundation. As the other shoe drops, and nation-states collapse, we expect a nasty reaction, particularly in the wealthy countries where the “national economy” brought high income to unskilled work in the twentieth century.

我们相信，归根结底，信息技术的出现所引起的大政治条件的变化将导致彻底的制度变革。本书的论点是，民族国家的集权注定要私有化和商业化。像所有真正彻底的制度变革一样，主权的私有化和商业化将涉及对世界理解方式的“常识”的革命。这种变化很少以渐进、线性的方式发生。恰恰相反。事实上，由于我们在《大清算》中探讨的原因，它几乎被排除在外。我们预计信息时代将带来不连续性——与过去的制度和意识的彻底决裂。以下是随着这一过程的展开需要关注的内容：

We believe that when all is said and done, the change in megapolitical conditions occasioned by the advent of information technology will result in radical institutional change. The thesis of this book is that the massed power of the nation-state is destined to be privatized and commercialized. Like all truly radical institutional change, the privatization and commercialization of sovereignty will involve a revolution in the “common sense” of the way the world is comprehended. Such change seldom happens in a gradual, linear way. To the contrary. Indeed, for reasons we explored in The Great Reckoning, it is practically ruled out. We expect the Information Age to bring discontinuities—sharp breaks with the institutions and the consciousness of the past. Here is what to look for as the process unfolds:

1. 前几章描述的那种经济组织变化是由于微处理的影响而引起的。
2. Changes in economic organization of the kind described in previous chapters arising from the impact of microprocessing.
3. 所有在地理边界内而非地理边界外运作的组织的重要性或多或少都会迅速下降。政府、工会、持牌职业和游说者在信息时代的重要性将不如在工业时代。由于从政府手中夺取的贸易优惠和限制将变得不那么有用，因此在游说中浪费的资源将更少^。4
4. A more or less rapid falloff in importance of all organizations that operate within rather than beyond geographic boundaries. Governments, labor unions, licensed professions, and lobbyists will be less important in the Information Age than they became during the Industrial Age. Because favors and restraints of trade wrested from governments will be less useful, fewer resources will be wasted in lobbying.⁴
5. 人们越来越普遍地认识到民族国家已经过时，导致全球许多地方爆发了大规模的分裂运动。
6. Wider recognition that the nation-state is obsolete, leading to widespread secession movements in many parts of the globe.
7. 传统精英的地位和权力下降，民族国家象征和信仰所受尊重也下降。
8. A decline in the status and power of traditional elites, as well as a decline in the respect accorded the symbols and beliefs that justify the nation-state.
9. 一种强烈甚至暴力的民族主义反应，主要发生在那些失去地位、收入和权力的人身上，他们认为自己所谓的“普通生活”被政治权力下放和新的市场安排所打乱。这种反应的特点包括：
   1. 怀疑和反对全球化、自由贸易、“外国”所有权和地方经济的渗透；
   2. 对移民抱有敌意，尤其是对那些与原国家群体有明显差异的群体；
   3. 民众对信息精英、富人、受过良好教育的人的仇恨，以及对资本外逃和工作岗位消失的抱怨；
   4. 民族主义者为了阻止个人和地区脱离摇摇欲坠的民族国家而采取的极端措施，包括诉诸战争和“种族清洗”行为，以强化民族主义者对国家的认同，并使国家对人民及其资源的要求合理化。
10. An intense and even violent nationalist reaction centered among those who lose status, income, and power when what they consider to be their “ordinary life” is disrupted by political devolution and new market arrangements. Among the features of this reaction:
    1. suspicion of and opposition to globalization, free trade, “foreign” ownership and penetration of local economies;
    2. hostility to immigration, especially of groups that are visibly different from the former national group;
    3. popular hatred of the information elite, rich people, the well-educated, and complaints about capital flight and disappearing jobs;
    4. extreme measures by nationalists intent upon halting the secession of individuals and regions from faltering nation-states, including resort to wars and acts of “ethnic cleansing” that reinforce nationalist identification with the state and rationalize the state’s claims on people and their resources.
11. 信息技术显然有助于主权个体摆脱国家权力，对强制性措施崩溃的反应也将包括新卢德主义对这些新技术及其使用者的攻击。
12. Since it will be obvious that information technologies facilitate the escape of Sovereign Individuals from the power of the state, the reaction to the collapse of compulsion will also include a neo-Luddite attack on these new technologies and those who use them.
13. 民族主义者和卢德分子的反应在各个地区和人群中并不统一：
    1. 在工业化时代人均收入较低、市场深化提高所有技能群体收入的快速增长经济体中，这种反应不会那么强烈。
    2. 反动情绪在目前富裕的国家中会最为强烈，特别是在那些以前享受高收入的价值贫乏者和技术贫乏者比例较高的社区中^。
    3. 尽管有大学炸弹客的存在，新卢德分子仍将吸引主要民族国家中收入水平处于底层三分之二的人群作为其大部分追随者。
    4. 然而，民族主义者和卢德分子的反应最强烈的并不是那些极其贫困的人群，而是那些拥有中等技能、资历较差、在工业时代成年并面临社会向下流动的人群。
14. The nationalist-Luddite reaction will not be uniform across regions and population groups:
    1. The reaction will be less intense in rapidly growing economies where per capita income was low during the industrial era, and where the deepening of markets raises incomes among all skill groups.
    2. Reactionary sentiments will be most intensely felt within the currently rich countries, and especially in communities with high percentages of the value-poor and skill-poor who previously enjoyed high incomes.^I
    3. The Unabomber notwithstanding, the neo-Luddites will attract most of their adherents among those in the bottom two-thirds of earnings capacity within the populations of leading nation-states.
    4. The nationalist and Luddite reaction will be strongest, however, not among the very poor but among persons of middling skills, under-achievers with credentials, who came of age during the industrial era and face downward mobility.
15. 随着新的超级政治条件催生出新的身份意识以及新的互补意识形态和道德观，民族主义的旧要求将失去吸引力。
16. As new megapolitical conditions give rise to a new consciousness of identity, along with new, complementary ideologies and morality, the old imperatives of nationalism will lose their appeal.
17. 民族主义反应将在新千年的最初几十年达到顶峰，然后随着分散主权的效率被证明优于民族国家的集权而逐渐消退。我们怀疑，民族国家对替代管辖权的先天欺凌，以俄罗斯入侵车臣为例，将倾向于剥夺在信息时代的超级政治条件下成长起来的新一代人对民族和民族主义狂热分子的同情。
18. The nationalist reaction will peak in the early decades of the new millennium, then fade as the efficiency of fragmented sovereignties proves superior to the massed power of the nation-state. We suspect that the congenital bullying by nation-states of alternative jurisdictions, exemplified by the Russian invasion of Chechnya, will tend to deprive nations and nationalist fanatics of the sympathy of the new generations that come to maturity under the megapolitical conditions of the Information Age.
19. 民族国家最终将在财政危机中崩溃。系统性危机通常发生在失败的机构遭受支出上升和收入下降之时——随着退休金和医疗支出在 21 世纪初激增，这种情况必然会困扰领先的民族国家。在我们撰写本文时，英国和美国都背负着数万亿美元的无资金养老金债务（按人均计算），这两个国家都不太可能控制住。其他领先的民族国家也面临着类似的破产负担。
20. The nation-state will ultimately collapse in fiscal crisis. Systemic crises typically arise when failing institutions suffer from rising expenses and falling income—a situation that is bound to beset the leading nation-states as retirement benefits and medical outlays balloon early in the twenty-first century. As we write, both the United Kingdom and the United States are burdened with multitrillion-dollar unfunded pension liabilities (comparable on a per capita basis) that neither is likely to tame. Other leading nation-states face similarly bankrupting burdens.

与文艺复兴的相似之处

PARALLELS WITH THE RENAISSANCE

我们之前概述了理由，认为保姆国家崩溃的后果将与五个世纪前圣母教会制度垄断的崩溃后果非常相似。与今天的民族国家并无二致，当时的教会几个世纪以来一直处于无可争议的主导地位。在某些方面，教会的地位甚至比五百年后的国家还要牢固。教会长期以来一直声称自己是“基督教社会的普世权威”。5这是中世纪知识分子历史学家约翰·B·莫拉尔的描述。^然而，尽管在 1490 年代技术革命之前，很少有欧洲人会质疑教会在基督教世界中的至高无上地位，但教会在其传统角色中勉强存活了一代人。

We previously outlined reasons for thinking that the collapse of the nanny state will have consequences closely parallelling those associated with the collapse of the institutional monopoly of the Holy Mother Church five centuries ago. Not unlike the nation-state today, the Church then had been in a position of unchallenged predominance for centuries. In some respects, the Church was even more firmly established than the state became five hundred years later. The Church had long claimed to act as “the universal authority at the head of Christian society.”⁵ That is the characterization of medieval intellectual historian John B. Morrall. Yet while few Europeans would have disputed the Church’s claim to supremacy in Christendom before the technological revolution of the 1490s, the Church barely survived in its traditional role for another generation.

良心的私有化

The Privatization of Conscience

到 1520 年代初，数百万善良的欧洲人拒绝了天主教会的普世权威，而就在几十年前，天主教会还是一种可以处以酷刑和死刑的异端邪说。事实上，许多中世纪欧洲的大教堂和教堂都装饰着异端邪说的教育性雕刻，他们的舌头被恶魔扯掉。6^这些酷刑所传达的教训一定给许多目不识丁的教区居民留下了深刻印象，他们只需通过惩罚就能认出受害者是异教徒。图像的含义是明确的：异教徒就是那些舌头被割断的人。然而，尽管这种惩罚很严厉，但它只是对异教徒的终极惩罚——火刑——的热身。

By the early 1520s, millions of good Europeans had rejected the universal authority of the Catholic Church, a heresy punishable by torture and death just a few decades previously. Indeed, many medieval European cathedrals and churches were decorated with instructive carvings of heretics having their tongues torn out by demons.⁶ The lesson these tortures conveyed must have impressed many illiterate parishioners who could have recognized the victims as heretics simply by their punishment. The iconography was unambiguous: heretics were those whose tongues were mutilated. Yet harsh as this punishment was, it was merely the warm-up for the ultimate punishment for heresy: death at the stake.

然而，令教会沮丧的是，这一教训并不足以令人生畏。印刷机的出现大大增加了异端论据的供应量，甚至连残酷惩罚的前景都无法阻止异端分子。事实上，近代早期欧洲不少不幸的宗教自由先驱者因宣称精神独立而付出了代价，被割掉舌头。其他人则被绑在火刑柱上烧死。宗教裁判所的反动派分子将人们烧死，只因为他们说出了我们认为是普通的良心表达。

To the Church’s dismay, however, the lesson was not sufficiently intimidating. The advent of the printing press inflated the supply of heretical arguments so dramatically that even the prospect of gruesome punishment ceased to deter would-be heretics. Indeed, not a few unlucky, pioneers of religious freedom in early modern Europe did pay for their assertions of spiritual independence by having their tongues cut out. Others were burned at the stake. The agents of reaction in the Inquisition literally incinerated people for uttering what we would consider ordinary expressions of conscience.

总而言之，宗教改革及其引发的反应使数百万人丧生。仅三十年战争后半段，战场上的死亡人数就达到 1,151,000 人。7^还有许多人死于饥荒、疾病以及宗教裁判所和其他当局之手。但并非所有暴力行为都是天主教当局所为。据信被国王亨利八世残忍杀害的一千多名英国天主教领袖的尸骨在伦敦塔被发现。包括托马斯·莫尔爵士和圣约翰·费舍尔主教在内的一些人因拒绝放弃旧信仰而被公开处决。8^{另一方面，}国王亨利八世的天主教女儿玛丽王后因从父亲那里遗传了梅毒而精神错乱，在她统治的最后两年里将三百名新教异教徒绑在火刑柱上烧死了。这就是不同信仰的人为坚持自己的宗教信仰和长期被剥夺的选择他们所支持的教会的权利而付出的代价。

All told, the Reformation and the reaction it inspired cost millions their lives. Battlefield deaths in the final half of the Thirty Years’ War alone totaled 1,151,000.⁷ Many more died from famine, disease, and at the hands of the Inquisition and other authorities. By no means all the violence was perpetrated by Catholic authorities. The bones of more than a thousand leading English Catholics thought to have been brutally murdered by King Henry VIII have been uncovered at the Tower of London. Some, including Sir Thomas More and Bishop St. John Fisher, were openly executed for refusing to abandon the old faith.⁸ King Henry VIII’s Catholic daughter, Queen Mary, on the other hand, insane with syphilis inherited from her father, incinerated three hundred Protestant heretics at the stake in the last two years of her reign. Such was the price paid as individuals of different persuasions asserted their religious convictions and the long-denied right to choose the church they supported.

从我们二十世纪末的角度来看，这些个人信仰的表达完全属于宗教自由和言论自由的保护范围。但在十六世纪初，既没有宗教自由，也没有言论自由。当时的权威仍然以日渐衰落的中世纪世界观为依据。在他们看来，个人自治与权威（尤其是教皇的充分权力）的对抗是令人愤慨的，具有明显的颠覆性。正如神学历史学家尤安·卡梅伦所说，马丁·路德等宗教改革者采取的观点“意味着与旧教会的制度和精神连续性进行有意识和果断的决裂” ^。9

Seen from our vantage at the end of the twentieth century, these expressions of personal belief were well within the range that should be protected by freedom of religion and freedom of speech. But there was neither freedom of religion nor freedom of speech in the early sixteenth century. The authorities of the day still drew their bearings from the waning medieval worldview. To their eyes gestures of individual autonomy in opposition to authority, especially the plentitude potestatis (fullness of power) of the pope were outrageous and decidedly subversive. As theological historian Euan Cameron said, religious reformers like Martin Luther adopted views that “meant a deliberate and decisive break with the institutional and spiritual continuity of the old Church.”⁹

叛乱与叛国

Heresy and Treason

本着这种精神，我们预计民族国家将“蓄意而果断地打破”其制度和意识形态的连续性。到下个世纪前 25 年末，数百万正直的个人将犯下相当于 16 世纪异端的世俗罪行——一种低级叛国罪。他们将撤回对摇摇欲坠的民族国家的效忠，以维护自己的主权，维护自己作为顾客选择治理形式的权利，而不是选择主教或礼拜堂。主权的私有化将与五个世纪前的良心私有化相提并论。两者都是主流机构前支持者的大规模叛逃。正如“企业、组织和国家衰落的反应”专家阿尔伯特·奥·赫希曼 (Albert O. Hirschman) 所写，这种退出很难，因为“退出常常被视为犯罪，因为它被贴上了开小差、叛变和叛国的标签。” ¹⁰

In that spirit, we anticipate “a deliberate and decisive break” with the institutional and ideological continuity of the nation-state. By the end of the first quarter of the next century, millions of upright individuals will have committed the secular equivalent of sixteenth-century heresy—a kind of low treason. They will have withdrawn allegiance from the faltering nation-state to assert their own sovereignty, their right to choose not their bishops or their house of worship but their form of governance as customers. The privatization of sovereignty will parallel the privatization of conscience of five centuries earlier. Both are the mass defection of former supporters of dominant institutions. As Albert O. Hirschman, an expert on “responses to decline in firms, organizations and states,” has written, this type of exit is difficult because “exit has often been branded as criminal, for it has been labelled desertion, defection and treason.”¹⁰

主权个人将不再仅仅接受国家强加给他们的人力资源。数百万人将摆脱公民义务，成为政府提供的有用服务的顾客。事实上，他们将创建和赞助平行机构，这些机构将把与公民身份相关的大部分服务完全置于商业基础上。在二十世纪的大部分时间里，生产者一直被国家视为资产，就像奶农对待奶牛一样。他们受到的压榨越来越大。现在奶牛将长出翅膀。

Sovereign Individuals will no longer merely accede to what is imposed upon them as human resources of the state. Millions will shed the obligations of citizenship to become customers for the useful services governments provide. Indeed, they will create and patronize parallel institutions that will place most of the services associated with citizenship on an entirely commercial basis. For most of the twentieth century, the productive have been treated as assets by the state, in much the way that the dairy farmer treats milk cows. They have been squeezed ever more vigorously. Now the cows will sprout wings.

背叛公民身份

Defection from Citizenship

正如新的超级政治条件在 16 世纪削弱了教会的垄断地位一样，我们预计信息时代的超级政治最终将决定 21 世纪的治理条件，无论其新条件在那些将现代政治价值观融入自己价值观的人看来有多么离谱。从“公民”身份到“顾客”身份的演变意味着对过去的背叛，其严重程度不亚于近代早期从骑士精神到公民身份的转变。信息精英背离公民身份将产生与五百年前数百万欧洲人放弃教皇无误论的刺激因素非常相似的刺激因素。

Just as new megapolitical conditions undermined the monopoly of the Church in the sixteenth century, we expect the megapolitics of the Information Age to ultimately dictate the terms of governance in the twenty-first century, no matter how outrageous its new terms may seem to those who incorporate the values of modern politics as their own. The evolution from the status of “citizen” to that of “customer” entails a betrayal of the past as sharp as the transition from chivalry to citizenship in the early modern era. The defection of the information elite from citizenship will have a stimulus much like that which led millions of Europeans five hundred years earlier to renounce the infallibility of the pope.

如果与宗教改革的比较并不引人注目，部分原因可能是今天还不能立即看出放弃对宗教机构的忠诚曾经是二十世纪叛国罪那样的大事。除了少数伊斯兰国家外，二十世纪末的异端是一种精神上的轻罪，对个人的打击不大。比在三十英里区域以四十五英里的速度行驶的超速罚单更令人难堪。II事实上，在欧洲和北美，不相信上帝或否认他们所信奉的信仰的关键信条的神职人员甚至主教并不罕见。^今天，异端邪说几乎需要公然崇拜魔鬼才会引人注目。在大多数西方国家，宗教教义是如此不成熟和草率，以至于很少有人能识别出过去异端邪说争论的焦点神学观点。11^这反映了人们的注意力普遍从宗教转移。

If the parallel with the Reformation is not compelling, it may be partly because it is not immediately evident today that renunciation of loyalty to religious institutions was ever the big deal that treason became in the twentieth century. Outside of a few Islamic countries, heresy at the end of the twentieth century is a spiritual misdemeanor, no more shattering to an individual’s reputation than a speeding ticket for driving forty-five in a thirty-mile zone.^II Indeed, it is not uncommon in Europe and North America to find clergy and even bishops who do not believe in God or deny crucial tenets of the faith they espouse. Today, a heresy would almost need to be blatant devil worship to be noticeable. In most Western countries, religious doctrines are so ill-formed and sloppily held that few persons can identify the theological points that were the focus of controversy of heresies in the past.¹¹ This reflects the general shift of attention away from religion.

某种程度上，宗教领袖们实际上帮助引导了 20 世纪后期人们脱离对精神问题的严肃关注，他们将精力从精神关注转移到游说者和社会煽动者身上。他们像松散的文件一样被权力的磁铁吸引，将大部分活动用于向政治领导人施压，要求他们采取对民族主义协议至关重要的再分配政策。阿根廷天主教会大声呼吁卡洛斯·梅内姆总统的政府放弃经济改革，转而支持传统的通货膨胀货币政策和凯恩斯主义财政政策，这就是明证。新西兰和许多其他国家的宗教领袖也对重组臃肿预算的努力提出了类似的抱怨。天主教主教们强烈游说反对美国的福利改革。

To some extent, religious leaders have actually helped to lead the late-twentieth-century defection from seriousness about spiritual issues by deflecting their energies away from spiritual preoccupations to become lobbyists and social agitators. Drawn like loose filings to the magnet of power, they devote much of their activities to pressuring political leaders to adopt redistributive policies crucial to the nationalist bargain. Witness the loud efforts of the Catholic Church in Argentina to pressure the government of President Carlos Menem to abandon economic reforms in favor of conventional inflationary monetary and Keynesian fiscal policies. Similar complaints have been lodged by religious leaders against efforts to restructure bloated budgets in New Zealand and many other countries. Catholic bishops lobbied vigorously against the reform of welfare in the United States.

财政审判？

A Fiscal Inquisition?

简而言之，当代宗教领袖们将他们日益衰落的道德权威主要集中在世俗救赎和鼓动上，以影响国家，而不是精神救赎。鉴于这一记录，可以预见，他们将作为同谋参与反对即将到来的世俗改革。随着民族国家受到挑战并开始动摇，它将不再能够履行对民众支持至关重要的物质利益承诺。法国大革命时期达成的事实上的交易将失效。国家将不再能够保证其公民享受低成本或免费的教育，更不用说医疗保健、失业保险和养老金，以换取原本报酬微薄的军事服务。虽然战争要求的变化将使政府能够在不部署大规模军队的情况下保卫自己和其统治下的领土，但这几乎不会减轻政府因违反已成为不合时宜的交易而受到的批评。

Simply put, contemporary religious leaders focus much of their declining moral authority on secular redemption and agitation to influence the state rather than on spiritual salvation. Given this record, they can be expected to participate as accomplices in the reaction against the coming secular reformation. As the nation-state is challenged and begins to wobble, it will no longer be able to fulfill the promises of material benefits that are central to popular support. The de facto bargain struck at the time of the French Revolution will lapse. The state will no longer be capable of guaranteeing its citizens low-cost or free schooling, much less medical care, unemployment insurance, and pensions in exchange for otherwise poorly paid military service. While the changing requirements of warfare will enable governments to defend themselves and territories under their dominion without fielding mass armies, this will hardly relieve governments of the criticism for breaking what has become an anachronistic bargain.

事实上，随着新的大政治逻辑的确立，其后果将受到新信息经济的失败者的强烈反对。因此，几乎可以肯定的是，许多宗教领袖和主要政党政府支出的受益者将站在怀旧反应的最前线，寻求重申民族主义的主张。他们会声称，任何美国人、法国人、加拿大人或其他国家的人——填空——都不应该被允许饿着肚子睡觉。即使是像新西兰这样走在改革前沿、从“市场友好型全球主义”中获益最多的国家，也会受到反动失败者的折磨。他们会试图阻止资本和人员跨境流动。而且他们不会就此止步。像新西兰优先党领袖温斯顿·彼得斯这样的煽动家太懒了，根本无法思考新世界将如何运作。但是，温斯顿和他的团队会在适当的时候了解到信息经济的逻辑。他们将试图阻止计算机、机器人、电信、加密和其他信息时代技术的传播，这些技术正在促进全球经济几乎每个部门的工人流离失所。无论你走到哪里，都会有一些政客为了阻止个人宣布脱离政治独立，不惜破坏长期繁荣的前景。

Indeed, as the new megapolitical logic takes hold, its consequences will prove wildly unpopular with the losers in the new information economy. It is therefore all but certain that many religious leaders, along with the primary beneficiaries of government spending, will be at the forefront of a nostalgic reaction seeking to reassert the claims of nationalism. They will claim that no American, Frenchman, Canadian, or other nationality—fill in the blank —should be allowed to go to bed hungry. Even countries that have been at the forefront of reform and stand to benefit disproportionately from “market-friendly globalism,” like New Zealand, will be tormented by reactionary losers. They will seek to thwart the movement of capital and people across borders. And they will not stop there. Demagogues, like Winston Peters, leader of the New Zealand First Party, are too lazy to think originally about how the new world will function. But, in due course, Winston and his crew will be tipped off to the logic of the information economy. They will seek to halt the diffusion of computers, robotics, telecommunications, encryption, and other Information Age technologies that are facilitating the displacement of workers in almost every sector of the global economy. Wherever you turn, there are politicians who will gladly thwart the prospects for long-term prosperity just to prevent individuals from declaring their independence of politics.

20/20 视力

20/20 Vision

到 2020 年，也就是马丁·路德在维滕贝格教堂门上钉上他的 95 条颠覆性论纲的五个世纪之后，人们对公民身份成本效益比的看法将经历类似的颠覆性澄清。有能力和财富的人，即未来的主权个人，对民族国家的愿景将经历相当于政治的激光手术。他们将看得更清楚。在二十世纪，就像整个现代一样，暴力的持续高回报使大政府成为有利可图的提议。尽管对收入和资本征收了掠夺性税收，但集权的果断动员了富人和野心家对经合组织民族国家的忠诚。在第二次世界大战后紧接着的十年里，政客们能够在每个经合组织国家征收接近或超过 90% 的边际税率。

By 2020, or roughly five centuries after Martin Luther nailed his 95 subversive theses on the church door at Wittenberg, the perception of the cost-benefit ratios of citizenship will have undergone a similar subversive clarification. The vision of the nation-state among persons of ability and wealth, the Sovereign Individuals of the future, will have undergone the political equivalent of laser surgery. They will be seeing 20/20. In the twentieth century, as throughout the modern era, persistently high returns to violence made big government a paying proposition. The decisiveness of massed power mobilized the allegiance of the wealthy and ambitious to OECD nation-states, notwithstanding predatory taxes imposed on income and capital. Politicians were able to impose marginal tax rates approaching or exceeding 90 percent in every OECD country in the decade immediately following World War II.

正如我们所探讨的，富人别无选择，只能接受这种强加。环境迫使他们依赖能够大规模控制暴力的政府来获得保护。经合组织政府征收垄断税几乎不重要，也许对有机会被派往香港的英国警察来说除外。在工业时代，任何希望享受前沿经济机会的高收入者通常别无选择，只能居住在高税率经济体中。这意味着承担与所提供的服务不成比例的税收负担。

As we have explored, the rich had little choice but to accede to such impositions. Circumstances obliged them to rely for protection upon governments that could master violence on a large scale. It rarely mattered, except perhaps to British policemen with the chance to take a posting to Hong Kong, that OECD governments imposed monopolistic taxes. Anyone with high earnings capacity who wished to enjoy leading-edge economic opportunity during the Industrial Age usually had little option but to reside in a high-tax economy. This meant shouldering a tax burden out of proportion to services rendered.

政治的算术

The Arithmetic of Politics

19 世纪美国副总统约翰·C·卡尔霍恩 (John C. Calhoun) 精明地勾勒出现代政治的算术。卡尔霍恩的公式将民族国家的全部人口分为两类：纳税人，他们对政府服务成本的贡献大于他们所消费的；税收消费者，他们从政府获得的利益超过他们对成本的贡献。除了少数显着的例外，在 20 世纪末，大多数经合组织企业家都是夸张的净纳税人。例如，1996 年，英国纳税人中收入最高的 1% 承担了总所得税负担的 17%。他们比收入最低的 50% 的人多缴纳了 30%，而后者只缴纳了 13% 的所得税。在美国，富人的负担更加沉重，1995 年，最富有的 1% 的人支付了总所得税的 30.2%。12^富人不仅必须为弗雷德里克·C·莱恩 (Frederic C. Lane) 提醒我们的那样“质量低劣、价格过高”的服务付费，而且他们支付的费用往往与任何服务都不成比例。13^最富有的纳税人支付的福利往往全部给了其他人。在大多数情况下，富人乐于少消费政府服务，因为这些服务通常质量低下。几乎每个国家的政府机构都是出了名的低效，主要是因为它们往往由缺乏提高生产率动力的员工控制。几乎以任何标准衡量，工业时代最大的纳税人为政府服务支付的费用都是竞争市场价值的许多倍。

Nineteenth-century American Vice President John C. Calhoun shrewdly sketched the arithmetic of modern politics. Calhoun’s formula divides the entire population of the nation-state into two classes: taxpayers, who contribute more to the cost of government services than they consume; and tax consumers, who receive benefits from government in excess of their contribution to the cost. With a few conspicuous exceptions, most OECD entrepreneurs were net taxpayers to an exaggerated extent as the twentieth century wound down. For example, in 1996, the top 1 percent of British taxpayers shouldered 17 percent of the total income tax burden. They paid 30 percent more than the bottom 50 percent of earners, who contributed just 13 percent of income tax payments. In the United States, the rich shouldered an even more exaggerated burden, with the top 1 percent paying 30.2 percent of the total income tax receipts in 1995.¹² Not only were the rich obliged to pay for service that, as Frederic C. Lane reminds us, “was of poor quality and outrageously overpriced,” but their payments were often not proportionate to any service whatever.¹³ The benefits for which the top taxpayers paid often went entirely to others. In most cases, the rich were glad to under-consume government services, which were typically of low quality. Government bureaus in almost every country were famously inefficient, largely because they tended to be controlled by employees who lacked an incentive to improve productivity. By practically any measure, the largest taxpayers during the industrial era paid many times more for government services than they would be worth in a competitive market.

这一点几乎无人忽视。然而不幸的是，在 20 世纪中叶，人们很少认识到，向政府支付保护费，用莱恩的话来说，“按照理想的标准，这是一种浪费”。相反，这只是一个需要接受的缺陷，“是社会组织中存在的各种浪费之一” ^。14

This hardly went unnoted. Unhappily, however, the recognition that payments to government for protection were, in Lane’s words, “wasteful by ideal standards” was seldom an actionable insight in the middle of the twentieth century. Rather it was simply a defect to be accepted, “one of various kinds of waste built into social organization.”¹⁴

例如，不满者可以选择的替代方案不是从英国移居法国，也不是从美国移居加拿大。除了极少数情况外，这样做收效甚微。主要民族国家都面临同样的问题。它们或多或少都采用了没收性税收制度。要实现自治权的大幅提升，就必须完全脱离欧洲和北美的核心国家，前往边缘国家。亚洲、南美部分地区以及各个偏远岛屿的税负明显较低。但逃避掠夺性税收通常要付出代价——失去经济机会，而且生活水平往往下降。正如我们所探讨的，在工业时代的条件下，在实施没收性税收的核心工业民族国家以外的大多数司法管辖区，经济机会受到限制，生活水平低于平均水平。

The alternative for the discontented was not to move from Britain to France, for example, or from the United States to Canada. Except in rare circumstances, that would have availed little. The leading nation-states all suffered from the same drawback. They all adopted more or less confiscatory tax regimes. To realize a significant increase in autonomy one had to escape the core countries of Europe and North America altogether and head for the periphery. Tax burdens were meaningfully lower in parts of Asia, South America, and on various remote islands. But there was usually a price to be paid for escaping predatory taxation—a loss of economic opportunity and, often, a decline in living standards. As we have explored, in the conditions of the Industrial Age, economic opportunity was constrained and living standards were subpar in most of the jurisdictions outside the core industrial nation-states that indulged in confiscatory taxation.

以共产主义制度为例。与许多第三世界政权一样，它们通常不征收高额所得税，甚至根本不征收任何税。III^尽管如此，在苏联存在的四分之三个世纪中，几乎没有企业家在那里寻求避税。虽然苏联的所得税率不高，但没有任何优势，因为苏联拒绝承认财产权。这比税收更沉重。共产主义制度使得组织企业和赚大钱几乎不可能。实际上，共产主义国家没收了税前收入。

Consider the Communist systems as a paradigm. Along with many Third World regimes, they typically did not impose high income taxes—or even any at all.^III Nonetheless, during the three-quarters of a century the Soviet Union existed, few, if any, entrepreneurs sought tax refuge there. While the Soviet income tax rates were not high, they afforded no advantage because the Soviets made a virtue of their refusal to recognize property rights. This imposed an even worse burden than taxation. The Communist systems made it all but impossible to organize a business and make any serious money. In effect, the Communist state confiscated pretax income.

此外，如果有人已经拥有稳定的收入，却因为某种奇怪的原因选择住在莫斯科或哈瓦那，那么他很难用钱来购买体面的生活水平。除了可以抽上好的雪茄、吃鱼子酱、欣赏优秀的管弦乐队和芭蕾舞之外，前共产主义体制下的生活几乎没有什么消费乐趣。大多数稀缺的美好生活都无法获得，或者根据政治影响而不是公开交换而严格配给。尽管有可能证实后现代生活批评者的刻板印象，即强调“消费在后现代体验中的重要性”，但自共产主义垮台以来，全球商品和服务水平的提高无疑使司法管辖区之间的竞争更加激烈，从而有助于削弱与国家和地方的联系^。15

Further, had anyone already possessing a secure income for some eccentric reason chosen to live in Moscow or Havana, he would have been hard-pressed to use money to purchase a decent standard of living. Outside of access to good cigars, caviar, excellent orchestras, and the ballet, life in the former Communist systems afforded few consumer pleasures. Most of the scarce good things of life were unavailable or were tightly rationed on the basis of political influence rather than open exchange. At the risk of validating the stereotype of critics of postmodern life who emphasize “the importance of consumption in the postmodern experience,” the rising standard of goods and services available worldwide since the fall of Communism has surely made competition between jurisdictions more lively, thereby helping to weaken ties to nation and place.¹⁵

在旧政权统治下，消费者的选择非常有限，甚至卡斯特罗本人如果想清理牙齿上的高希巴雪茄碎片，也很难弄到一包像样的牙线。直到最近，即使是全球许多地方的富人也无法享受西欧或北美中产阶级普遍拥有的生活质量。面对这种悲惨的局面，大多数杰出人才在工业时代被迫接受民族主义交易。他们留在原地，缴纳高得离谱的税款，以换取特定民族国家提供的可疑保护，而该民族国家垄断了他们出生地的暴力活动。

Under the old regime, consumer choices were so limited that even Castro himself would have been hard-pressed to secure a packet of decent dental floss had he wanted to clean cohiba fragments from his teeth. Until recently, not even the rich in many parts of the globe could enjoy the quality of life that was common among the middle classes in Western Europe or North America. Faced with this doleful situation, most persons of outstanding talent were moved to accept the nationalist bargain during the Industrial Age. They stayed put and paid outrageously high taxes for the doubtful protection offered by the particular nation-state that monopolized violence in the territory in which they were born.

“天堂现在已经关闭并被天使封锁，所以现在我们必须继续前进，环游世界，看看是否有办法在某个地方找到回去的路。”

—海因里希·冯·莱斯特

“Paradise is now shut and locked, barred by angels, so now we must go forward, around the world and see if somehow, somewhere, there is a back-way in.”

—HEINRICH VON KLEIST

共产主义的垮台拆除了阻碍旅行和有效阻止商业全球化的“铁幕”，从而使世界人为地“变大”。喷气式飞机与破坏共产主义的信息技术相结合，加剧了高端旅游美元的竞争。银行家们成群结队地进出即使是最偏远的省份，也极大地刺激了全球住宿和美食的标准。我们这里指的不是麦当劳汉堡包和肯德基连锁店的扩张，甚至在莫斯科和布加勒斯特等以前令人望而生畏的地方也是如此。不那么引人注意但更重要的是，领先的连锁酒店和高品质的坐式餐厅的扩张，这些餐厅供应的是特级红葡萄酒而不是伏特加和可乐。由于这种转变，现在任何有钱的人都可以在地球上几乎任何地方享受高物质生活水平。确实，如今几乎每个国家都有一流的酒店和至少一家能引起米其林评审员兴趣的餐厅。

The fall of Communism removed an “Iron Curtain” that had impaired travel and effectively blocked the globalization of commerce, thereby keeping the world artificially “large.” The jet plane, in combination with the information technologies that undermined Communism, increased competition for high-end travel dollars. The parade of bankers trooping in and out of even the most remote provinces was a prodigious stimulus to the standard of accommodation and cuisine worldwide. By this, we are not referring to the spread of McDonald’s hamburgers and Kentucky Fried Chicken franchises, in even such formerly forbidding venues as Moscow and Bucharest. Less noticed, but more important, has been the spread of leading hotel chains, and high-quality sit-down restaurants serving grand cru clarets rather than vodka and Coke. Thanks to this transformation, anyone who can afford it can now enjoy a high material standard of life almost anywhere on the planet. Indeed, it is now a rare country where there is not a first-class hotel and at least one restaurant that would interest a Michelin inspector.

正如赫希曼在二十五年前所预见的，技术进步大大增加了退出作为解决服务提供和定价不令人满意问题的吸引力。他写道：“另一方面，对国家的忠诚是我们可以没有的……只有当各国由于通讯的进步和全面的现代化而开始变得相似时，过早和过度退出的危险才会出现，‘人才流失’就是目前的例子。” ¹⁶请注意，正如我们在第 8 章中指出的那样，赫希曼的“过早和过度退出”标准是从民族国家被抛弃的角度来看的，而不是从个人寻求更好生活的角度来看的。

As Hirschman anticipated a quarter of a century ago, technological advance has significantly increased the appeal of exit as a solution to unsatisfactory provision and pricing of services. He wrote: “Loyalty to one’s country, on the other hand, is something we could do without.… Only as countries start to resemble each other because of the advances of communications and all-around modernization will the danger of premature and excessive exits arise, the ‘brain drain’ being a current example.”¹⁶ Note as we pointed out in chapter 8 that Hirschman’s standard of “premature and excessive exits” is seen from the perspective of the nation-state being deserted, not from the perspective of the individual seeking a better life.

尽管如此，他关于国家之间的相似性将增加叛逃和退出的吸引力的结论是无可辩驳的。现在在任何地方过上好日子都更容易，这一事实使得在成本最低的地方生活更有吸引力。然而，比几乎在任何地方都能过上好日子更重要的是，现在你可以在任何地方赚取高收入。不再需要居住在高成本的管辖区才能积累足够的财富，正如凯恩斯勋爵所建议的那样，“明智、愉快和幸福地”生活。出于我们已经探讨过的原因，微技术改变了民族国家赖以生存的潜在的超级政治基础。在信息时代，一种新的网络经济将出现，超出任何政府垄断的能力。技术将首次使个人能够在一个不容易屈从于系统强制要求的领域积累财富。

Nonetheless, his conclusion that similarities between countries will increase the attraction of defection and exit is unimpeachable. The fact that it is now easier to live well anywhere makes living where the cost is least onerous appealing. Yet more important than the fact that you can live well almost anywhere is the fact that you can now earn a high income anywhere. It is no longer necessary to reside in a high-cost jurisdiction in order to accumulate sufficient wealth to live, as Lord Keynes advised, “wisely, agreeably and well.” For reasons we have already explored, microtechnology changes the underlying megapolitical foundation upon which the nation-state rests. In the Information Age, a new cybereconomy will emerge beyond the capacity of any government to monopolize. For the first time, technology will enable individuals to accumulate wealth in a realm that cannot be bent easily to the demands of systematic compulsion.

新社会，因而也是新文化，一方面，将由机器比人做得更好、自动化将取代越来越多的低技能任务来定义；另一方面，将由信息技术赋予那些真正拥有知识的人的力量来定义。才能来加以利用。这样的社会将会出现更大的紧张局面，一小撮人可以称为信息贵族，而不断壮大的下层阶级可以称为信息穷人。两者之间的区别之一是，信息穷人要么受地理限制，要么从迁移中获益不大。正如我们在其他地方讨论的那样，信息贵族的流动性极强，因为他们可以在任何对他们有吸引力的地方赚钱，就像流行小说家一直能够做到的那样。一百年前，罗伯特·路易斯·史蒂文森可以在太平洋的一个岛上谋生；现在，信息贵族都可以做同样的事情。

The new society, and therefore the new culture, will be defined at one end by what machines can do better than people, by automation that will do away with increasing numbers of low-skill tasks, and at the other by the power that information technology gives to people who actually have the talent to take advantage of it. Such a society will have greater tensions between a small class, who might be termed the information aristocracy, and a growing underclass, who might be termed the information poor. One of the differences between them will be that the information poor will either be tied by geography or will find little benefit from moving. The information aristocracy, as we discuss elsewhere, will be extremely mobile, since they will be able to earn money in any locale that is attractive to them, just as popular novelists have always been able to do. Robert Louis Stevenson could earn his living on an island in the Pacific a hundred years ago; now the information aristocracy can all do the same thing.

不同司法管辖区之间的市场竞争

Market Competition Between Jurisdictions

由于信息技术超越了地域专制，它将自动使世界各地的司法管辖区在质量和价格的基础上面临事实上的全球竞争。换句话说，像大多数其他实体一样，行使地方垄断的政府最终将受到真正的市场竞争，竞争的基础是它们如何更好地服务于客户。这将很快不可避免地使人们意识到，工业时代青睐高成本制度的旧逻辑已经逆转。领先的民族国家，以其掠夺性的再分配税制和严厉的监管，将不再是人们选择的司法管辖区。冷静地看，它们以垄断价格提供劣质的保护和减少的经济机会。在未来的几年里，它们可能会被证明比其他地区（如收入传统上更不平等的拉丁美洲）更不受社会接受和暴力。领先的福利国家将因叛逃而失去最有才华的公民。

Because information technology transcends the tyranny of place, it will automatically expose jurisdictions everywhere to de facto global competition on the basis of quality and price. In other words, governments exercising local territorial monopolies, like most other entities, finally will be subject to real market competition on the basis of how well they serve their customers. This will soon make it unavoidably obvious that the old logic that favored high-cost regimes in the industrial era has reversed. Leading nation-states, with their predatory, redistributive tax regimes and heavy-handed regulations, will no longer be jurisdictions of choice. Seen dispassionately, they offer poor-quality protection and diminished economic opportunity at monopoly prices. In the years to come, they may prove to be more socially unreceptive and violent than other regions such as Latin America where incomes have traditionally been more unequal. The leading welfare states will lose their most talented citizens through desertion.

“超国家”时代即将到来

The “Extranational” Age Ahead

随着“个人主权”时代的到来，许多最有能力的人将不再认为自己是某个民族的成员，不再认为自己是“英国人”、“美国人”或“加拿大人”。一种新的“跨国”或“超国家”的世界观以及一种确定自己在世界中所处位置的新方式有待在新千年中被发现。如前所述，这种新兴心态的早期证据来自一项研究，即几乎一半的 MTV 青少年观众希望离开自己的出生国，以实现自己想要的生活。这种新的身份认同与国籍不同，不会是 20 世纪使民族国家和国家体系普遍存在的系统性强制的产物。

As the era of the “Sovereign Individual” takes shape, many of the ablest people will cease to think of themselves as party to a nation, as “British” or “American” or “Canadian.”’ A new “transnational” or “extranational” understanding of the world and a new way of identifying one’s place in it await discovery in the new millennium. As indicated before, early evidence of this emerging mind-set was provided in the finding that almost half of teenaged viewers of MTV expect to leave the country of their birth in order to achieve the life they want for themselves. This new equation of identity, unlike nationality, will not be a product of the systematic compulsion that made nation-states and the state system universal in the twentieth century.

当今世界发生的各种事态发展都被普遍描述为“国际性的”，这一事实本身就表明，民族主义范式已经渗透到我们理解世界的方式中。在经历了两个世纪的“国际关系”和“国际法”的神秘灌输之后，我们很容易忽视“国际”并不是一个长期存在的西方概念。事实上，“国际”这个词是由杰里米·边沁于 1789 年发明的。它首次出现在他的著作《道德与立法原则导论》中。边沁写道：“必须承认，国际这个词是一个新词，尽管希望它足够类似且易于理解。” ¹⁷这个词流行起来，但并不仅限于边沁想要的狭义。“国际”逐渐成为全球发生的任何事件的模糊同义词。

The mere fact that developments embracing the whole globe are commonly described as “international” shows how deeply the nationalist paradigm has penetrated into our way of conceiving the world. After two centuries of indoctrination in the mysteries of “international relations” and “international law,” it is easy to overlook that “international” is not a longstanding Western concept. In fact, the word international was invented by Jeremy Bentham in 1789. It was first used in his book An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation. Bentham wrote, “The word international it must be acknowledged, is a new one, though it is hoped sufficiently analogous and intelligible.”¹⁷ The word caught on, but not just in the narrow sense that Bentham intended. “International” came to be a sloppy synonym for anything that happens across the globe.

国际时代始于 1789 年，与法国大革命同年。它持续了两个世纪，直到 1989 年欧洲爆发反共产主义起义。我们认为第二次革命标志着国际时代的终结，这不仅仅是因为声名狼藉的共产主义国歌是《国际》。国有制计划经济是民族国家最雄心勃勃的表达。国家权力与民族主义之间的密切关系反映在语言中。现代最具攻击性的动词是“国有化”，意思是将一切纳入国家所有和控制。在国际时代，这个词在全球大部分地区的煽动家口中随处可见。现在它已成为过去词汇的一部分。国有化已经过时，正是因为国家权力已经过时。

The International Age began in 1789, the same year as the French Revolution. It lasted for two centuries, until 1989, when the revolt against Communism in Europe began. We believe that that second revolution marked the end of the International Age, and not merely because the discredited Communist anthem was “The International.” The command economy with state ownership was the most ambitious expression of the nation-state. The close relationship between state power and nationalism was reflected in language. The most aggressive verb of the Modern Age was “to nationalize,” meaning to bring under state ownership and control. It was a word that tripped easily off the tongues of demagogues in most parts of the globe during the International Age. Now it is part of the vocabulary of the past. Nationalization has become anachronistic, precisely because state power has become anachronistic.

在现代的暮色中，国家集中的权力被技术创新和市场力量的相互作用所削弱。现在，市场胜利的下一个阶段即将展开。不仅个别民族国家将开始解体，而且在我们看来，民族国家俱乐部——联合国，也注定要破产。如果联合国在千禧年后不久解散，我们不会感到惊讶。

In the twilight of the modern era, the concentrated power of the state was undermined by the interaction between technological innovation and market forces. Now the next stage in the triumph of the market is about to unfold. Not only will individual nation-states begin to dissolve, but in our view even the club for nation-states, the United Nations, is destined to go bankrupt. We would not be surprised to see the UN liquidated sometime soon after the turn of the millennium.

如果“国际”是一只股票，那么现在正是抛售的好时机。这一概念很可能在新千年被取代，或至少被缩小到其原有的含义，因为整个世界将不再由一个相互关联的主权国家体系所主导。随着微型司法管辖区和主权个人的重要性日益增加，关系将呈现新的“超国家”形式。拉布拉多海岸飞地与主权个人之间的争端不会被正确地描述为“国际”争端。它将是超国家的。

If “international” were a stock, now would be the time to sell. The concept is likely to be supplanted in the new millennium, or at least narrowed to its original meaning for the compelling reason that the whole world will no longer be dominated by a system of interrelating sovereign nations. Relations will take on the novel “extranational” forms dictated by the growing importance of microjurisdictions and Sovereign Individuals. A dispute between an enclave on the coast of Labrador and a Sovereign Individual will not rightly be described as an “international” dispute. It will be extranational.

在即将到来的新时代，社区和忠诚将不受领土限制。身份认同将更准确地针对真正的亲和力、共同的信仰、共同的兴趣和共同的基因，而不是虚假的民族主义者如此关注的亲和力。保护将以新的方式组织起来，而六分仪、铅垂线或测量员工具包中划定领土边界的其他早期现代仪器无法解析这些新方式。

In the new age to come, communities and allegiances will not be territorially bounded. Identification will be more precisely targeted to genuine affinities, shared beliefs, shared interests, and shared genes, rather than the bogus affinities so prominent in the attention of nationalists. Protection will be organized in new ways that cannot be parsed by a sextant, a plumb line, or other early modern instruments in a surveyor’s kit that demarcate territorial borders.

发明的社区和传统​

INVENTED COMMUNITIES AND TRADITIONS

人类必须自然地把自己置于一个被称为民族的“发明”社区中的想法，在下个世纪将被世界主义精英视为古怪和不合理的，就像在人类存在的大多数时期一样。正如社会学家安东尼·吉登斯所写，民族国家“在历史上没有先例”。18^民族主义权威迈克尔·比利格进一步阐述了这一点：

The idea that humans must naturally place themselves in an “invented” community called a nation will come to be seen by the cosmopolitan elite as eccentric and unreasonable in the next century, as it would have been through most of human existence. The nation-state, as sociologist Anthony Giddens wrote, has “no precedent in history.”¹⁸ Michael Billig, an authority on nationalism, amplified that point:

在其他时候，人们没有语言和方言的概念，更不用说领土和主权的概念，而这些概念在今天是如此普遍，对“我们”来说似乎如此物质真实。这些概念如此强烈地植根于当代的常识中，以至于人们很容易忘记它们是虚构的永恒。蒙塔尤或圣马特奥作坊里的中世纪鞋匠，在 700 年之后，现在在我们看来可能只是狭隘的、迷信的人物。但他们会发现我们对语言和民族的观念非常神秘；他们会困惑为什么这种神秘主义会成为生死攸关的问题^。19

At other times people did not hold the notions of language and dialect, let alone those of territory and sovereignty, which are so commonplace today and which seem so materially real to “us.” So strongly are such notions embedded in contemporary common sense that it is easy to forget that they are invented permanencies. The mediaeval cobblers in the workshops of Montaillou or San Mateo might, with the distance of 700 years, now appear to us narrow, superstition-bound figures. But they would have found our ideas on language and nation strangely mystical; they would be puzzled why this mysticism could be a matter of life and death.¹⁹

我们猜想，在国家之外的未来中思考的人们也会同样感到困惑。正如本尼迪克特·安德森所说，国家是“想象的共同体”。20^这并不是说想象的东西一定是微不足道的。正如约翰逊博士所观察到的，如果不是因为想象，一个人会很乐意“与女仆或公爵夫人同寝”。然而，对于那些在二十世纪成年的人来说，“国家”似乎是一个不可避免的组织单位，以至于很难理解它们是“想象的”而不是自然的。为了理解未来与我们熟悉的世界有多么不同，有必要看看民族主义是如何强加于工业时代的“常识”的。

We suspect that thinking people in the extranational future will be equally puzzled. As Benedict Anderson put it, nations are “imagined communities.”²⁰ This is not to say that what is imagined is necessarily trivial. As Dr. Johnson observed, if not for imagination, a man would as gladly “lie with a chamber maid as a duchess.” Still, for those who came of age during the twentieth century, “nations” may seem so inevitable a unit of organization that it is difficult to grasp that they are “imagined” rather than natural. In order to understand how different the future may be from the world with which we are familiar, it is necessary to see how nationalism has been imposed upon the “common sense” of the Industrial Age.

人们很容易忽视“民族共同体”在多大程度上是由不断投入的想象力形成的。没有客观标准来准确定义哪些群体应该是一个“民族”，哪些群体不应该是一个“民族”。严格地说，也没有“自然边界”，正如著名历史学家欧文·拉蒂莫尔和 CR·惠特克所指出的那样。拉蒂莫尔在谈到帝制中国时说：“一个主要的帝国边界不仅仅是一条划分地理区域和人类社会的线。它还代表着一个特定社会增长的最佳极限。” ²¹或者正如哥伦比亚大学经济学家罗纳德·芬德利所说，“就经济学而言，一个特定经济体系或‘国家’的边界以及生活在这些边界内的人口通常被视为既定的。但很明显，无论这些边界在国际法中变得多么神圣，它们都曾在某个时候在敌对的声索者之间发生过争夺，并最终由争夺双方的经济和军事力量平衡决定。” ²²

It is easy to overlook the degree to which the “national community” is formed by a continuing investment of imagination. There are no objective criteria to define accurately which group should be a “nation” and which should not. Nor, strictly speaking, are there “natural frontiers,” as eminent historians Owen Lattimore and C. R. Whittaker have shown. “A major imperial boundary,” Lattimore said, writing of imperial China, “is not merely a line dividing geographical regions and human societies. It also represents the optimal limit of growth of one particular society.”²¹ Or as Columbia University economist Ronald Findlay put it, “Insofar as they are considered at all in economics, the boundaries of a given economic system or ‘country’ are generally regarded as given, along with the population living within those boundaries. Yet it is obvious that, however sanctified these boundaries may have become in international law, they were all at one time or another contested between rival claimants and determined ultimately by the balance of economic and military power between the contending parties.”²²

即使有人掌握了世界上一半民族国家的全部数据和一系列精细的卫星地图，也无法预测其他民族国家的边界​​在哪里。也没有任何科学方法可以从生物学或语言学上区分一个民族的成员和另一个民族的成员。无论尸检程序多么先进，都无法在飞机失事后从基因上区分美国人、加拿大人和苏丹人的遗体。国家和民族之间的界限并不是自然形成的，就像物种之间的界限或动物品种之间的物理区别一样，它们是过去和现在为展示权力而做出的努力的产物。

Someone with all the data available on half the world’s nation-states and a collection of fine satellite maps would not be able to predict where the boundaries of the other nation-states would fall. Nor is there any scientific way of distinguishing biologically or linguistically the members of one nationality from those of another. No autopsy procedure, however advanced, could distinguish genetically among the remains of Americans, Canadians, and Sudanese after a plane crash. The boundaries between states and nationalities are not natural, like the boundaries between species or the physical distinctions between breeds of animals, Rather, they are artifacts of past and ongoing efforts to project power.

“语言是一种拥有军队和海军的方言。”

—马里奥·裴

“A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.”

—MARIO PEI

语言作为权力的产物​

LANGUAGES AS ARTIFACTS OF POWER

令人惊奇的是，语言也有同样的情况。

Surprisingly, much the same can be said of languages.

在民族国家统治了几个世纪之后，认为“语言”不是区分民族的客观基础的想法似乎有些欠考虑，甚至荒谬。但仔细观察一下。现代语言的历史清楚地表明，它们在多大程度上被塑造为加强民族认同。我们现在理解和使用的西方“语言”并非自然演变成现在的形式。它们与“方言”也没有客观区别。在现代世界，没有人希望说“方言”。几乎每个人都希望自己的母语被视为真正的“语言”。

After centuries of nation-state dominance, the idea that “language” does not form an objective basis for distinguishing between peoples may seem ill-considered or even absurd. But look more closely. The history of modern languages clearly reveals the degree to which they were shaped to reinforce nationalist identification. Western “languages” as we now understand and speak them did not naturally evolve into their current forms. Nor are they objectively distinguishable from “dialects.” In the modern world, no one wishes to speak a “dialect.” Almost everyone prefers that his native tongue be considered the genuine article—a “language.”

“不要说在这样的时刻语言毫无用处。语言和行动是一体的。强有力的肯定能让人安心心创造行为——说出什么就会产生什么。在这里，行动是言语的仆人，它顺从地落后，就像在世界的第一天一样：“他说，世界就存在了。”

—米歇莱特，1792 年 8 月

“Let no man say that the word is of little use in such moments. Word and Action are together one. The powerful energetic affirmation that reassures hearts creates acts—that which is said is produced. Action here is the servant of the word, it fallows behind submissively, as on the first day of the world: He said and the world was.”

—MICHELET, August 1792

“言行合一”

“Word and Action Are Together One”

例如，在法国大革命之前，法国南部使用的混合拉丁语，即奥克语或奥克语，与西班牙北部加泰罗尼亚的方言相比，与成为“法语”基础的巴黎方言奥伊语有更多的共同之处。^事实上，当《人权和公民权宣言》以巴黎风格发表时，大多数居住在法国境内的人都听不懂。23法国革命者面临的挑战之一是如何将他们的传单和法令翻译成无数村庄的方言，而这些村庄彼此之间只能模糊地听懂。

Prior to the French Revolution, for example, the version of mongrelized Latin spoken in southern France, la langue d’oc or Occitan, had more in common with the vernacular spoken in Catalonia in northern Spain, than with la langue d’oil, the speech of Paris that became the basis of “French.” Indeed, when the “Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen” was published in the Parisian style, it was unintelligible to a majority living within the current borders of France.²³ One of the challenges the French revolutionaries faced was calculating how to translate their broadsides and edicts into the patois of innumerable villages that were only vaguely intelligible to one another.

生活在后来成为“法国”的地区的人们有着截然不同的说话方式，这些方式被有意识地融合成一种官方语言，这是一项政策问题。自弗朗索瓦一世于 1539 年颁布《维莱科特雷敕令》以来，书面法语一直是法院的官方语言^。24但这并不意味着它被广泛理解，就像“法律法语”在 1200 年成为法院的官方语言后在英国被广泛理解一样。每一种都是“行政白话”，而不是在整个领土上使用和理解的标准语言。

The people living within what became “France” had quite different ways of speaking that were consciously conflated into one official language as a matter of policy. Written French had been the official language of the courts of justice since François I issued the Edict of Villers-Cotterêts in 1539.²⁴ But this did not mean that it was widely intelligible, any more than “law French” was widely intelligible in England after 1200, when it became the official language of the courts of justice. Each was an “administrative vernacular,” not a standardized language spoken and understood throughout the territory.

法国革命者希望创造一种更全面的语言，一种民族语言。历史学家詹尼斯·朗金斯在《语言社会史》中评论道：“革命者中有影响力的一群人认为，有意识地在共和国领土上推行标准法语，将促进革命的胜利和启蒙运动的传播。” ²⁵这种“有意识的努力”包括对个别词语的使用大惊小怪。以形容词“革命者”为例，它于 1789 年首次被米拉波使用。朗金斯说，经过一段“相当广泛和不加区分的使用”的时期，“在恐怖统治期间，随后是几十年的压制和遗忘时期……1795 年 6 月 12 日，国民公会决定改革语言以及我们前暴君（即被击败的罗伯斯庇尔派）创建的制度，在官方称谓中用“革命者”一词代替“革命者”。²⁶这种语言工程的传统在法国当局对“周末”等从英语进入法语的词汇的严格接收中得以保留。

The French revolutionaries wanted to create something more comprehensive, a national language. Historian Janis Langins comments in The Social History of Language that “an influential body of opinion among the revolutionists believed that the triumph of the Revolution and the spread of enlightenment would be furthered by a conscious effort to impose a standard French in the territory of the Republic.”²⁵ This “conscious effort” included a good deal of fussing over the use of individual words. Consider the telling example of the adjective “revolutionary,” first used by Mirabeau in 1789. After a period of “somewhat wide and indiscriminant use,” as Langins puts it, “during the Terror there followed a period of suppression and oblivion for several decades.… On June 12, 1795, the Convention decided to reform the language as well as the institutions created by our former tyrants [i.e., the vanquished Robespierrists] in replacing the word ‘revolutionary’ in official designations.”²⁶ This tradition of language engineering survives in the finicky reception of the French authorities to words like “weekend” that have made their way into French from English.

然而，两个世纪前，法国的国家语言工程师们所歧视的不仅仅是来自英吉利海峡对岸的语言；他们面临着更大的任务，即在共和国境内消除地方语言变体。这项工作不仅限于压制奥克语。当时里维埃拉使用的“法语”与更东边使用的“意大利语”更接近，而不是巴黎法语。同样，阿尔萨斯的语言也可以归类为德语的一种形式，而德语本身也有许多地方变体。巴斯克语在比利牛斯山脉使用。与法国西北海岸使用的布列塔尼语一样，巴斯克语与作为“法语”基础的任何拉丁语“方言”几乎没有共同之处。东北部也有相当数量的佛兰芒语使用者。正如迈克尔·比利格提醒我们的那样，“巴黎风格的讲话方式”不是通过自发的市场过程传播的，而是“在法律和文化上被强加为‘法语’”。 ” ²⁷

Two centuries ago, however, the national language engineers in France were not discriminating merely against words from across the English Channel; they faced a much bigger job eradicating local variants of speech within the territory of the republic. This exercise was not merely confined to suppressing la langue d’oc. The “French” spoken on the Riviera then was closer to the “Italian” spoken farther to the east than to Parisian French. Equally, the language of Alsace could arguably have been categorized as a form of German, which itself had numerous local varieties. Basque was spoken in the Pyrenees. Like Breton, spoken along the northwest coast of France, Basque had little in common with any of the vernacular “dialects” of Latin that were the basis of “French.” There were also substantial numbers of Flemish speakers in the northeast. “The Parisian style of speech,” as Michael Billig reminds us, was not spread through spontaneous market processes, but “imposed, legally and culturally, as ‘French.’ ”²⁷

法国的情况也适用于其他民族国家建设。语言通常由军队携带，并由殖民势力强加。例如，非洲独立后的地图是根据欧洲列强的行政语言占主导地位的地区来定义的。当地方言很少在学校教授。公认的“语言”往往用来定义“民族”，即使是具有任意殖民边界的民族，而“方言”则没有，两者之间的区别在很大程度上是政治性的。

What was true in France has been true elsewhere in the building of nation-states. Languages were often carried by armies and imposed by colonial powers. For example, the map of Africa after independence was defined according to the areas where the administrative languages of European powers predominated. Local dialects were seldom taught in schools. The distinctions between recognized “languages,” which tended to define “nations,” even nations with arbitrary colonial borders, and “dialects,” which did not, were in large measure political.

简而言之，强制推行“国语”是全世界为加强国家权力而采用的手段之一。鼓励或强迫国家垄断暴力的领土内所有人说“母语”，在促进权力行使方面具有显著优势。

In short, the imposition of a “national language” was part of a process used worldwide to enhance the power of the state. Encouraging or obliging everyone within the territory where the state monopolized violence to speak “the mother tongue” conveyed significant advantages in facilitating the exercise of power.

语言统一的军事层面

The Military Dimension of Language Uniformity

在暴力行为不断增加的世界里，采用国语可以带来军事优势。国语几乎是民族国家中央权力巩固的先决条件。鼓励公民使用同一种语言的中央政府更能削弱地方巨头的军事力量。法国大革命后语言的标准化使最便宜、最有效的现代军事力量——国家征兵军成为可能。通用语言使来自“国家”各个地区的军队能够流利地相互交流。这是大规模征兵军取代独立军队的先决条件，独立军队不是由中央政府而是由强大的地方巨头召集和控制的。

In a world where returns to violence were rising, the adoption of a national language conveyed military advantages. A national language was almost a precondition to consolidation of central power in nation-states. Central authorities that encouraged their citizens to speak the same tongue were better able to weaken the military power of local magnates. The standardization of language after the French Revolution made the cheapest and most effective form of modern military force—national conscript armies—feasible. A common language enabled troops from all regions of the “nation” to communicate fluently with one another. This was a prerequisite before massed conscript armies could displace independent battalions mustered and controlled not by the central authorities but by powerful local magnates.

正如我们在第 5 章中讨论的那样，在法国大革命之前，军队是由地方统治者组建和指挥的，他们可能会也可能不会回应战斗号召从巴黎或其他首都发出。无论哪种情况，他们的立场都是经过仔细谈判后确定的。正如查尔斯·蒂利所指出的，“给予或拒绝支持的能力赋予了……巨大的谈判能力。” ²⁸此外，就中央当局而言，独立军事单位还有一个缺点，那就是能够抵抗政府征用国内资源的努力。显然，无论是国王还是革命大会的中央当局，都面临着一项艰巨的挑战，即向地方当权者征税或以其他方式剥夺资源，而这些当权者指挥着能够保卫这些资产的私人军队。

Prior to the French Revolution, as we discussed in Chapter 5, troops were raised and commanded by local potentates who might or might not answer calls to battle issued from Paris or another capital. In either event, their stance was determined after careful negotiation. As Charles Tilly notes, the “ability to give or withhold support afforded… great bargaining power.”²⁸ Furthermore, independent military units had the additional drawback, as far as the central authorities were concerned of being capable of resisting government efforts to commandeer domestic resources. Clearly, central authorities, whether King or Revolutionary Convention, had a difficult challenge to collect taxes or otherwise strip resources from local potentates who commanded private armies capable of defending those assets.

“国家军队”大大增强了国家政府在整个领土内实施其意志的权力。国家语言的推行在促进国家军队的组建方面发挥了决定性作用。在国家军队能够组建和有效运作之前，其各成员能够流利地交流显然是有益的。

“National armies” greatly enhanced the power of the national government to impose its will throughout a territory. Imposition of a national language played a decided role in facilitating the formation of national armies. Before national armies could form and function effectively it was obviously useful that their various members be able to communicate fluently.

因此，如果管辖范围内的每个人都能理解命令和指示，并沿着官僚指挥链传达某些情报，那么这对军事来说是一种优势。法国革命者几乎立即就证明了这一点的价值。除了开办相当于语言学校的学校外，他们还开设了为期一个月的特殊“速成班”，正如朗金斯所写，“来自法国各地的数百名学生将接受火药和大炮制造技术的培训。” ²⁹

It was therefore a military plus if everyone within a jurisdiction could comprehend orders and instructions, as well as convey certain intelligence back along the bureaucratic chain of command. The French revolutionaries demonstrated the value of this almost immediately. In addition to running the equivalent of a language school, they also set up special monthlong “crash courses” in which, as Langins writes, “hundreds of students from all over France would be trained in the techniques of gunpowder and cannon manufacture.”²⁹

法国方法的军事优势体现在他们在拿破仑时期取得的成功，以及相反的例子，这些例子表明，在战争期间，不能依靠共同语言的动员优势的政权会遭遇什么样的后果。第一次世界大战初期，导致俄罗斯军队惨败和士气低落的众多因素之一是，沙皇的贵族军官团倾向于用德语交流（罗曼诺夫王朝的另一种宫廷语言是法语），普通士兵，更不用说市民，都听不懂德语。

The military advantage of the French approach was shown by their successes in the Napoleonic period, as well as by contrary examples of what happened to regimes that could not depend upon the mobilization benefits of a common tongue during war. One of many factors that contributed to the disastrous defeats and demoralization of the Russian forces in the early days of World War I was the fact that the czar’s aristocratic officer corps tended to communicate in German (the other court language of the Romanovs was French), which the rank-and-file troops, not to mention the citizenry, did not understand.

这表明了共同语言的另一个重要的军事优势。它减少了打仗的动机障碍。如果宣传无法理解，宣传就毫无用处。在这方面，法国革命者也很好地适应了各种可能性。根据朗金斯的说法，他们的“主导思想”是“人民的意志……因此，他们必须用自己的特定语言表达民意，以认同民意。 ” ³⁰ 1789 年之前，“公民”之间相互无法理解是表达“人民意志”的一个障碍，因此会制约国家层面权力的行使。在工业化时期，多语言国家和帝国在动员战争方面面临着更多障碍。

This points to another important military advantage of a common language. It reduces the motivational hurdles to fighting a war. Propaganda is useless if incomprehensible. In this respect as well, the French revolutionaries were also well attuned to the possibilities. Their “dominant idea,” according to Langins, was “the will of the people.… They therefore had to identify themselves with the popular will by expressing it in its own particular language.”³⁰ Prior to 1789, mutual incomprehensibility among “citizens” was a drawback in expressing the “will of the people” and thus a check on the exercise of power at the national level. In more ways than one, multilingual states and empires faced higher obstacles in mobilizing for war during the industrial period.

因此，在边缘上，它们往往会被民族国家取代更有能力激励公民战斗并调动战争资源。民族主义的巩固就是一个例证，例如十八世纪末法国和法国人的诞生。民族主义权力下放的例子也说明了这一点，例如第一次世界大战后奥匈帝国的崩溃。哈布斯堡帝国之后出现的新民族国家——奥地利、匈牙利、捷克斯洛伐克和南斯拉夫——正如凯恩斯所说，“不完整和不成熟”。然而，他们声称要建立独立的民族国家，这些国家至少部分地由语言来定义民族身份，这说服了伍德罗·威尔逊和其他起草《凡尔赛条约》的盟国领导人。

At the margin, therefore, they tended to be supplanted by nation-states that were better able to motivate their citizens to fight and mobilize resources for war. This is exemplified by nationalist consolidation, such as the invention of France and the French at the end of the eighteenth century. It is also illustrated by cases of nationalist devolution, such as the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire after World War I. The new nation-states that emerged in the wake of the Hapsburg Empire—Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia—were, as Keynes said, “incomplete and immature.” Yet their claims to form independent nation-states grouped around national identities at least partly defined by language persuaded Woodrow Wilson and other Allied leaders drawing up the Treaty of Versailles.

第一次世界大战后中欧的分裂表明，语言在国家建设中是一把双刃剑。当暴力行为不断增加时，通用语言有助于权力的行使和司法权的巩固。然而，当巩固的动机较弱时，少数民族围绕语言争端形成的派系也倾向于分裂多语言国家。19 世纪中叶，奥匈帝国城市的分离主义情绪高涨，紧随其后的是流行病肆虐德语人口。19 世纪初，布拉格是一个讲德语的城市。和其他城市一样，随着世纪的展开，布拉格迅速发展，主要是通过移民，大量无地的捷克语农民从农村被同化。一开始，新来者发现有必要学习德语才能相处，于是他们就学了。但当饥荒和疾病在 19 世纪中叶夺走了大量德语城市居民的生命时，他们被捷克语农民取代。突然间，说捷克语的人太多了，新居民学习德语已不再是必需的。布拉格成了一个说捷克语的城市，也是捷克民族主义的温床。

The carving up of Central Europe after World War I illustrates what a double-edged sword language became in state-building. When returns to violence were rising, a common tongue facilitated the exercise of power and consolidated jurisdictions. However, when incentives to consolidate were weaker, factions formed by minorities around language disputes also tended to fracture multilingual states. The surge of separatist sentiment in the cities of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the mid-nineteenth century followed epidemics that devastated the German-speaking populations. Prague was a German-speaking city when the nineteenth century opened. Like other cities, it grew rapidly as the century unfolded, mostly by migration, as vast numbers of landless Czech-speaking peasants were assimilated from the countryside. In the beginning, the newcomers found it necessary to learn German in order to get along, so they did. But when famine and disease carried away large numbers of German-speaking urban residents in midcentury, they were replaced by Czech-speaking peasants. Suddenly there were so many Czech speakers that it was no longer essential for the new residents to learn German. Prague became a Czech-speaking city and a hotbed of Czech nationalism.

当代分离主义运动如今经常围绕多语言国家的语言争端而形成。比利时和加拿大就是这种情况，正如我们之前所指出的，这两个国家很可能是新千年中首批解散的经合组织国家之一。很少有政府能够超越魁北克人党在魁北克实施的强制语言统一的严厉措施。31^更令人惊讶的是，语言不满也在意大利北部分离主义者的早期活动中发挥了作用，而意大利也面临解体。20 世纪 80 年代初，当时的伦巴第联盟“宣布伦巴第语是意大利语以外的一种语言”。比利格评论说：“如果伦巴第联盟的计划在 20 世纪 80 年代初取得成功，伦巴第脱离意大利，建立自己的国家边界，那么可以预测：伦巴第语将越来越多地被视为与意大利语不同。” ³²这不是武断的断言。它反映了类似情况也曾发生过。例如，挪威于 1905 年独立后，挪威民族主义者开始齐心协力，识别和强调“挪威语”与丹麦语和瑞典语不同的特征。同样，支持白俄罗斯独立的活动家将路标改为“白俄罗斯语”，但显然未能表明白俄罗斯语是一种独立的语言，而不是俄语的一种方言。

Contemporary separatist movements now frequently form around language disputes in multilingual countries. This is evidently the case in Belgium and Canada, two nations that, as we noted earlier, will probably be among the first in the OECD to dissolve in the new millennium. Few governments can top the heavy-handed actions to enforce language uniformity imposed by the Parti Québecois in Quebec.³¹ More surprisingly, language grievances also played a role in launching the early activities of the northern separatists in Italy, which also faces disintegration. In the early 1980s, the Lombard League, as it was then known, “declared Lombardian to be a separate language from Italian.” Billig comments, “Had the League’s programme been successful during the early 1980s, and had Lombardy seceded from Italy, establishing its own state boundaries, a prediction might be made: increasingly Lombardian would have come to be recognized as different from Italian.”³² This is not an arbitrary assertion. It reflects what has happened in similar cases. For example, after Norway became independent in 1905, Norwegian nationalists set about a concerted effort to identify and underline features of the “Norwegian language” that were distinct from Danish and Swedish. Similarly, activists favoring an independent Belarus changed road signs into “Belarusian,” but apparently failed to make the point that Belarusian is a separate language rather than a dialect of Russian.

现在，支持语言统一的军事要求已经基本被超越，我们预计民族语言将会逐渐消失，但不会不战而败。可以预料的是，人们反复使用的格言“战争是国家的健康”将作为一种恢复手段进行检验。随着民族国家逐渐变得无关紧要，煽动者和反动派将煽动战争和冲突，就像前南斯拉夫和非洲许多司法管辖区（从布隆迪到索马里）发生的种族和部落战争一样。冲突将为那些试图阻止主权商业化趋势的人提供方便的借口。战争将促进维持更严格的税收制度的努力，并对逃避公民义务和负担的人施加更严厉的惩罚。战争将有助于巩固民族主义的“他们和我们”维度。对于系统性强制的支持者来说，商业化的主权，即让个人根据价格和质量选择主权服务，似乎是一种罪孽，不亚于宗教改革期间个人主张否决教皇判决并选择自己的救赎之路的权利。

Now that the military imperatives favoring language uniformity have largely been outstripped, we expect the national languages to fade, but not without a fight. It is to be expected that the well-rehearsed adage that “war is the health of the state” will be tested as a recuperative. As the nation-state slides into irrelevancy, demagogues and reactionaries will foment wars and conflicts, along the lines of ethnic and tribal fighting that has racked the former Yugoslavia and numerous jurisdictions in Africa, from Burundi to Somalia. Conflicts will prove convenient for the pretexts they provide for those seeking to arrest the trend toward commercialization of sovereignty. Wars will facilitate efforts to sustain more exacting regimes of taxation and impose more severe penalties for escaping the duties and burdens of citizenship. Wars will help undergird the “them, and us” dimension of nationalism. To the proponents of systematic coercion, commercialized sovereignty, which gives individuals a choice of sovereignty services based upon price and quality, will seem no less a sin than the assertion by individuals of the right to veto the judgments of the pope and choose their own path to salvation during the Reformation.

事实也强调了这种相似性，即 15 世纪末的印刷术和 20 世纪末的新信息技术都使以前神秘的知识得以自由地供个人使用。印刷机使人们能够直接阅读圣经和其他神圣的文本，而以前人们必须依靠牧师和教会高层来解释上帝的话语。新信息技术使任何有电脑的人都可以获取有关商业、投资和时事的信息，而以前只有政府和企业高层人士才能获得这些信息。

The parallel is underscored by the fact that both the new technology of printing at the end of the fifteenth century and the new information technology at the end of the twentieth place formerly occult knowledge at the disposal of individuals in a liberating way. The printing press brought the Scriptures and other holy texts directly within the reach of individuals who previously had to rely upon priests and the church hierarchy to interpret the Word of God. The new information technology brings within the reach of anyone with a computer hook-up information about commerce, investment, and current events that previously was available only to persons at the pinnacle of government and corporate hierarchies.

“印刷出版业的发展使新的民族意识成为可能，促进了现代民族国家的崛起。” ³³

—杰克·韦瑟福德

“[T]he development of printing and publishing made possible the new national consciousness and promoted the rise of modern nation states.”³³

—JACK WEATHERFORD

网络空间摇滚乐

Rock and Roll in Cyberspace

毫无疑问，互联网和万维网的出现对民族主义的破坏性将不亚于火药和印刷机的出现对民族主义的促进作用。全球计算机连接不会让拉丁语重新成为通用语言，但它们将帮助商业活动摆脱地方方言（如魁北克的法语），转向互联网和万维网的新全球语言——奥蒂斯·雷丁和蒂娜·特纳教给世界的语言，摇滚乐的语言，英语。

Make no mistake, the advent of the Internet and the World Wide Web will be as destructive to nationalism as the advent of gunpowder and the printing press was conducive to nationalism. Global computer links will not bring back Latin as a universal language, but they will help shift commerce out of local dialects, like French in Quebec, into the new global language of the Internet and World Wide Web—the language that Otis Redding and Tina Turner taught the world, the language of rock and roll, English.

这些新媒体将通过创造超越地理界限的新亲和力来削弱民族主义。它们将吸引广泛分布的受众，这些受众形成于受过教育的人所到之处。这些新的非领土亲和力将蓬勃发展，从而有助于为“爱国主义”创造新的焦点。或者更确切地说，它们将形成新的“内群体”，个人可以认同这些群体而不必牺牲他们的经济理性。犹太人过去两千年的历史表明，从长远来看，在当地条件恶劣的情况下，这是可能的。正如本章开头引用的威廉·普法夫的评论所表明的那样，认为对祖先的土地（patria ）的忠诚必然意味着对类似民族国家的机构的忠诚是不符合历史的，也是错误的。杰弗里·帕克和莱斯利·M·史密斯在《十七世纪的普遍危机》中更清楚地阐述了这一点，指出早期现代民族主义的例子往往是爱国者捍卫更狭隘的祖国的例子——通常是反对国家的侵犯。他们写道：“很多时候，所谓的对民族共同体的忠诚，经过检查，结果却不是这样的。祖国本身至少可能是家乡或省份，也可能是整个国家。” ³⁴

These new media will undercut nationalism by creating new affinities that supersede geographic boundaries. They will appeal to widely dispersed audiences that form wherever educated persons happen to find themselves. These new nonterritorial affinities will flourish, and in so doing help to create a new focus for “patriotism.” Or rather, they will form new “ingroups” with whom individuals can identify without necessarily sacrificing their economic rationality. The history of the Jews during the past two thousand years shows that this is possible over the long term and in the face of hostile local conditions. As the comment from William Pfaff quoted at the head of this chapter suggests, it is ahistorical and wrong to think that loyalties to the land of one’s fathers, the patria, necessarily entails loyalty to an institution resembling a nation-state. Geoffrey Parker and Lesley M. Smith make this even more clear in The General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century, showing that what appear to be examples of early modern nationalism are more often instances of patriots defending a much narrower patria —often against the encroachment of a state. They write, “All too often a supposed allegiance to a national community turns out, on inspection, to be nothing of the kind. The patria itself is at least as likely to be a home town or province as the whole nation.”³⁴

正如杰克·韦瑟福德在《野蛮人与文明》中清晰地解释的那样，印刷机的兴起，即第一种大规模生产技术，对政治的产生产生了巨大的影响，因为它要求人们效忠于更广泛的民族国家。到 1500 年，欧洲有 236 个地方使用印刷机。“他们总共印刷了大约 2000 万本书。” ³⁵古腾堡的第一本印刷书是拉丁文版的《圣经》。随后，他又出版了其他流行的中世纪拉丁文书籍。正如韦瑟福德所解释的那样，印刷术的发展方向与早期的预期背道而驰，当时人们认为，文本的随时可用会传播拉丁语甚至希腊语的使用。事实恰恰相反。印刷机没有加强拉丁语的使用有两个重要原因。首先，印刷机是一种大规模生产技术。正如本尼迪克特·安德森所指出的那样，“如果手稿知识是稀缺和神秘的传说，那么印刷知识则依靠可复制性和传播性而生存。” ³⁶1500 年，只有少数欧洲人会说多种语言。这意味着拉丁语作品的受众并不是大众。绝大多数只会说一种语言的人构成了一个更大的潜在读者市场。此外，读者的情况对作家来说更是如此。出版商需要产品来销售。由于当时很少有 15 或 16 世纪的作家能用拉丁语创作出令人满意的新作品，出版商受市场需求的驱使，用当地语言出版作品。因此，印刷有助于将欧洲划分为语言子集。这不仅受到新作品出版的推动，这些作品确立了新语言的身份，如西班牙语和意大利语，还受到罗马字体、意大利字体和重哥特字体等特色字体的采用的推动，这些字体直到 20 世纪才在德国出版界很常见。新的当地语言出版，即 Anderson 所说的“印刷资本主义”，非常成功。最值得注意的是，印刷机给异端邪说带来了决定性的推动力，这正是我们期望个人脱离互联网的决定性推动力。尤其是，路德成为“第一位如此知名的畅销书作家。或者换句话说，他是第一位能够凭借自己的名字‘销售’新书的作家。” ³⁷令人惊讶的是，路德的作品“占 1518 年至 1525 年间售出的所有德语书籍的三分之一以上。 ” ³⁸

As Jack Weatherford lucidly explains in Savages and Civilization, the rise of the printing press, the first mass-production technology, had dramatic effects in contributing to the creation of politics, with its demands for allegiance to a broader nation-state. By the year 1500, there were printing presses operating in 236 places in Europe. “and they had printed a combined total of some 20 million books.”³⁵ Gutenberg’s first printed book was an edition of the Bible in Latin. He followed it with editions of other popular medieval books in Latin. As Weatherford explains, printing meandered in a direction that defeated early expectations that the ready availability of texts would spread the use of Latin and even Greek. To the contrary. There were two important reasons why the printing press did not reinforce the use of Latin. First, the printing press was a mass-production technology. As Benedict Anderson points out, “[I]f manuscript knowledge was scarce and arcane lore, print knowledge lived by reproducibility and dissemination.”³⁶ Very few Europeans were multilingual in 1500. This meant that the audience for works in Latin was not a mass audience. The vast majority who were monoglot made up a much bigger market of potential readers. Furthermore, what was true of readers was even more true of writers. Publishers needed products to sell. Because there were few contemporary fifteenth- or sixteenth-century authors who could compose satisfactory new works in Latin, publishers were driven by market necessity to publish works in the vernacular. Printing thus helped to differentiate Europe into linguistic subsets. This was encouraged not only by the publication of new works that established the identity of new languages, like Spanish and Italian, but also by the adoption of characteristic typefaces, such as Roman, Italic, and the heavy Gothic script that was common to German publishing until well into the twentieth century. The new vernacular publishing, what Anderson describes as “print capitalism,” was very successful. Most notably, the printing press gave heresy the kind of decisive boost that we expect for the denationalization of the individual from the Internet. In particular, Luther became “the first best-selling author so known. Or to put it another way, the first writer who could ‘sell’ his new books on the basis of his name.”³⁷ Astonishingly, Luther’s works accounted for “no less than one third of all German-language books sold between 1518 and 1525.”³⁸

在许多方面，信息时代的新技术将抵消 15 世纪印刷术的部分超级政治影响，刺激和巩固民族国家的崛起。万维网创造了一个拥有全球语言英语的商业场所。它最终将通过同声翻译软件得到加强，使几乎每个人都能有效地掌握多种语言，并有助于语言和想象力的非民族化。正如印刷术破坏了对中世纪主导机构圣母教堂的忠诚一样，我们预计信息时代的新通信技术将破坏保姆国家的权威。在适当的时候，几乎每个地区都将成为多语言地区。地方方言将变得越来越重要。随着移民和少数民族语言使用者有勇气抵制融入国家，来自中心的宣传将失去其大部分连贯性。

In many respects, the new technology of the Information Age will counter part of the megapolitical impact of fifteenth-century technology, the printing press, in stimulating and underpinning the rise of nation-states. The World Wide Web creates a commercial venue with a global language, English. It will eventually be reinforced with simultaneous-translation software, making almost everyone effectively multilingual, and helping to denationalize language and imagination. Just as the technology of the printing press undermined allegiance to the dominant institution of the Middle Ages, the Holy Mother Church, so we expect the new communications technology of the Information Age to undermine the authority of the nanny state. In due course, almost every area will become multilingual. Local dialects will rise in importance. Propaganda from the center will lose much of its coherence as immigrants and speakers of minority tongues are emboldened to resist assimilation into the nation.

军事神秘主义​

MILITARY MYSTICISM

国家远非客观的共同体，就像“狩猎采集群体”是客观的一样，国家是出于一种神秘主义的想象，这种神秘主义是由一种已不复存在的军事命令所激发的。这种命令是通过一种认同感将生活在一个领土内的每个人联系起来，这种认同感可以使其看起来比生命本身更重要。正如坎托洛维茨所指出的，这并非巧合，“在历史的某一时刻，抽象的国家或作为一个法团的国家出现为一种神秘主义，而为这个新的神秘机构而死，其价值似乎与为上帝事业而牺牲的十字军同等！” ³⁹从这个意义上讲，民族国家可以被理解为一种神秘的构造。然而，正如比利格所指出的，民族主义是“一种平庸的神秘主义，它如此平庸，以至于所有的神秘主义似乎早已烟消云散。”它“将‘我们’与祖国联系在一起——这个特殊的地方不仅仅是一个地方，不仅仅是一个地理区域。在这一切中，祖国看起来朴实无华，毋庸置疑，如果有机会，它值得为之牺牲。尤其是男人，他们被赋予了特殊的、充满快乐的提醒，让他们意识到牺牲的可能性。” ⁴⁰

Far from being objective communities, in the same sense that, for example, “hunting-gathering bands” are objective, nations are imagined out of a mysticism inspired by a defunct military imperative. That was the imperative to link every person living within a territory through a sense of identity that can be made to seem more important than life itself. As Kantorowicz noted, it is not a coincidence that “at a certain moment in history the state in the abstract or the state as a corporation appeared as a corpus mysticism and that death for this new mystical body appeared equal in value to the death of a crusader for the cause of God!”³⁹ In this sense, the nation-state can, be understood as a mystical construct. Yet as Billig notes, nationalism is “a banal mysticism, which is so banal that all the mysticism seems to have evaporated long ago.” It “binds ‘us’ to the homeland—that special place which is more than just a place, more than a mere geophysical area. In all this, the homeland is made to look homely, beyond question and, should the occasion arise, worth the price of sacrifice. And men, in particular, are given their special, pleasure-saturated reminders of the possibilities of sacrifice.”⁴⁰

民族主义者一有机会就继续强调国家与家园之间的想象联系。正如比利格所说，国家“被想象成一个温馨的空间，在边界内舒适，远离危险的外部世界。而‘我们’祖国中的民族可以很容易地将‘我们自己’想象成某种家庭。” ⁴¹民族主义的陈词滥调被不知疲倦地、例行地重复，包括许多常见的亲属关系和身份隐喻。他们将国家与个人的“包容性适应”感联系起来，这是利他主义和牺牲的强大动机。

The imaginative link between the nation and home continues to be highlighted by nationalists at every opportunity. As Billig suggests, the nation is “imagined as homely space, cozy within its borders, secure against the dangerous outside world. And ‘we’ the nation within the homeland can so easily imagine ‘ourselves’ as some sort of family.”⁴¹ The clichés of nationalism, tirelessly and routinely repeated, include many commonplace metaphors of kinship and identity. They associate the nation with an individual’s sense of “inclusive fitness,” a powerful motive for altruism and sacrifice.

“牺牲利他主义确实存在于社会性昆虫、其他非人类动物和人类中，这意味着自我利益的最大化不能仅仅根据个体生物的欲望和需求来定义。事实上，利他主义的存在，特别是对粉丝的利他主义，需要对生物科学中传统的适者生存观念进行彻底的反思。这导致人们越来越坚信自然选择最终不会对个体起作用……” ⁴²

—R. P AUL S HAW 和Y UWA W ONG

“That sacrificial altruism does exist in social insects, other nonhuman animals, and humans implies that maximization of self-interest cannot be solely defined in terms of an individual organism’s wants and needs. Indeed, the presence of altruism, particularly toward fan, has required a whole rethinking of traditional notions of survival of the fittest in the biological sciences. This has resulted in a growing conviction that natural selection does not ultimately operate on the individual.…”⁴²

—R. PAUL SHAW AND YUWA WONG

民族主义与包容性适应

NATIONALISM AND INCLUSIVE FITNESS

本书主要关注的是改变人类选择成本和回报的客观“超级政治”因素。分析预测能力所依赖的基本前提是，个人会寻求回报并回避成本。这是查尔斯·达尔文所说的“自然经济”的基本事实。但这并不是全部真相。简单的奖励优化并不能解释生活中的一切。然而，它确实阐明了皮埃尔·范登所确定的人类社会性的三种主要形式中的两种Berghe 将其定义为“互惠和胁迫”。43 ^Van Den Berghe 所说的“互惠”是指“互惠合作”。44互惠最复杂、影响最深远的例子是市场互动：贸易、购买、销售、^生产和其他经济活动。“胁迫是使用武力谋取单方面利益，即为了种内寄生或掠夺的目的。” ⁴⁵正如我们在本卷和之前的两本书中所探讨的那样，我们认为胁迫是人类社会的一个关键要素，比通常认识到的要大。胁迫有助于确定财产安全，并限制个人进行互惠合作的能力。胁迫是所有政治的基础。 Van Den Berghe 的人类社会性类型学中的第三个要素是“亲属选择”，即动物与其亲属进行的合作行为。亲属选择也是“自然经济”的一个重要特征，下文将对此进行更详细的描述。

Our main focus in this book is on objective “megapolitical” factors that alter the costs and rewards of human choices. The underlying premise upon which the predictive power of the analysis rests is that individuals will seek rewards and shun costs. This is an essential truth of what Charles Darwin called “the economy of nature.” But it is not the whole truth. Simple reward optimization does not explain everything in life. However, it does illuminate two of the three main forms of human sociality, identified by Pierre Van Den Berghe as “reciprocity and coercion.”⁴³ By “reciprocity” Van Den Berghe means “cooperation for mutual benefit.”⁴⁴ The most complex and far-reaching examples of reciprocity are market interactions: trading, buying, selling, producing, and other economic activities. “Coercion is the use of force for one-sided benefit, that is, for purposes of intra-specific parasitism or predation.” ⁴⁵ As we have explored in this volume and two previous books, we believe that coercion is a crucial element in human society, a larger one than is usually recognized. Coercion helps determine the security of property and limits the ability of individuals to enter into mutually beneficial cooperation. Coercion underlies all politics. The third element in Van Den Berghe’s typology of human sociality is “kin selection,” the cooperative behavior that animals undertake with their kin. Kin selection, which is described more fully below, is also a crucial feature of the “economy of nature.”

正如杰克·赫什莱弗 (Jack Hirshleifer) 所写，“达尔文进化选择理论的复兴，应用于社会行为问题，即社会生物学”，具有“明显的经济方面”。并且：

As Jack Hirshleifer has written, “[T]he revival of Darwinian evolutionary selection theory as applied to problems of social behaviour, which has come to be known as sociobiology,” has “a distinctly economic aspect.” And:

纵观整个生命领域，社会生物学试图找到决定生物之间各种关联形式的一般规律。例如，为什么我们有时会观察到有性和家庭的现象，有时只观察到有性和家庭的现象，有时既没有性和家庭也没有？为什么有些动物会群居，而有些动物则独居？在群体中，为什么我们有时会观察到等级支配模式，有时却不会？为什么有些物种的生物会划分领地，而其他物种则不会？是什么决定了群居昆虫的无私，为什么这种模式在自然界如此罕见？我们何时看到资源以和平方式分配，何时以暴力方式分配？这些问题都是以可识别的经济术语提出和回答的。社会生物学家会问，观察到的关联模式对表现出这些模式的生物有什么净优势，以及这些模式在社会平衡状态下持续存在的机制是什么。也许正是这种对人类与其他生命形式之间的经济行为连续性的断言（被一位批评者称为“基因资本主义”）解释了一些理论家对社会生物学的敌意…… ⁴⁶

Looking over the whole realm of life, sociobiology is attempting to find the general laws determining the multifarious forms of association among organisms. For example, Why do we sometimes observe sex and families, sometimes sex without families, sometimes neither sex nor families? Why do some animals flock, others remain solitary? Within groups, why do we sometimes observe hierarchical dominance patterns, sometimes not? Why do organisms in some species partition territories, others not? What determines the selflessness of the social insects, and why is this pattern so rare in Nature? When do we see resources allocated peacefully, when by means of violence? These are questions both posed and answered in recognizably economic terms. Sociobiologists ask what are the net advantages of the observed association patterns to the organisms displaying them, and what are the mechanisms whereby these patterns persist in social equilibrium states. It is perhaps this assertion of economic-behavioural continuity between man and other life-forms (termed “genetic capitalism” by one detractor) that explains the hostility of some ideologues to sociobiology…⁴⁶

我们将社会生物学引入民族主义的分析中，因为它提供了有助于促进系统性胁迫的人性方面的视角。我们同意《历史之前的时间》一书的作者、自然科学家科林·塔奇的观点，即在我们能够理解当前的世界，更不用说了解未来的世界之前，我们需要了解历史的序言。这意味着我们必须“在时间的宏大尺度上审视自己”。47^塔奇提醒我们“在我们生活的表面震动之下，还有更深层、更强大的力量在起作用，最终会影响我们所有人和我们的同胞……” ⁴⁸我们怀疑，在“这些更深层、更强大的力量”是民族主义的根基，是受基因影响的动机成分。正如赫什莱弗引用亚当·斯密和 RH 科斯的话说，“人类的欲望最终是由人类的生物性质和地球上的处境所塑造的适应性反应。” ⁴⁹在大多数民族主义讨论中，这种观点都明显带有生物学暗示。即使在美国这样一个多民族国家，政府也被拟人化为“山姆大叔”。

We introduce sociobiology into our analysis of nationalism because it provides perspective on aspects of human nature that help facilitate systematic coercion. We agree with natural scientist Colin Tudge, author of The Time Before History, that before we can understand the current world, much less gain a perspective on that to come, we need to understand the preface to history. That means we must “look at ourselves on the grand scale of time.”⁴⁷ Tudge reminds us “that beneath the surface tremors of our lives there are much deeper and more powerful forces at work that in the end affect us all and all our fellow creatures.…”⁴⁸ We suspect that among “these deeper and more powerful forces” is a genetically influenced motivational component undergirding nationalism. As Hirshleifer points out, paraphrasing Adam Smith and R. H. Coase, “human desires are ultimately adaptive responses shaped by man’s biological nature and situation on earth.”⁴⁹ This comes to the fore with the obviously biological allusions in most discussions of nationalism. Even in the United States, a conspicuously multiethnic nation, the government is personified in familial terms as “Uncle Sam.”

生物遗传

The Biological Inheritance

简而言之，人类本性、物种起源及其通过自然选择而发展都是理解人类社会持续进化的因素。在本例中，我们考虑的是人类对信息技术带来的新情况可能做出的反应。特别是，我们关注的是人类对网络经济的出现及其诸多后果的反应，包括比过去任何情况都更明显的经济不平等的出现。至少部分预期反应的关键在于我们的遗传。

In short, human nature, the origin of species, and their development by natural selection are elements to be considered in understanding the continuing evolution of human society. In the present case we are considering the likely human response to new circumstances occasioned by information technology. Particularly, we are focusing on the reaction to the advent of the cybereconomy and its many consequences, including the emergence of economic inequality more pronounced than anything seen in the past. Keys to at least some of the expected response lie in our genetic inheritance.

当一个新物种形成时，它不会丢弃其原有物种所携带的所有 DNA，而是会添加一些 DNA。人类和黑猩猩之间的全部差异只存在于各自物种不到 2% 的 DNA 中；两者共有的 DNA 略多于 98%，其中一些 DNA 可追溯到非常原始的早期生物，在历史发展链中处于很低的位置。

When a new species is formed, it does not discard all the DNA that it carried in its previous form, but adds to it. The whole difference between a human being and a chimpanzee is contained in less than 2 percent of the DNA in each species; slightly over 98 percent of their DNA is common to both, and some of it can be traced back to very primitive early organisms, far down the historic chain of development.

遗传惯性​​

GENETIC INERTIA

人类文化同样包含着普遍的元素，其中一些确实是从前人类祖先那里继承下来的。我们如何寻找食物、如何交配、如何组建家庭、如何与陌生群体相处、如何保护自己，这些都是本能和文化的复杂混合，有着非常原始的根源。它们也都能够适应现代，比如现代民族国家的特征。如果我们以这种方式思考文化，我们就会把它们看作与基因发展平行。三大区别是：文化是通过人与人之间的信息链传播的，而不是通过代际之间的基因链传播的；它们在某种程度上——也许比我们想象的要小——可以通过有意识的智能行动来改变；它们随着成本和回报的普遍环境而变化，而成本和回报的变异速度比基因变化快得多。从体貌上看，我们与三万年前的祖先非常相似；但从文化上看，我们已经与他们相距甚远。

Human cultures similarly contain elements that are universal, some of which are indeed inherited from prehuman ancestors. How we seek food, how we mate, how we form families, how we relate to strange groups, how we defend ourselves are all complex mixtures of instinct and culture, with very primitive roots. They are also all capable of modern adaptations, such as those that have characterized the nation-state in the modern period. If we think of cultures in this way, we shall see them as parallel to genetic development. The three great differences are that cultures are transmitted by the information chain between human beings, not by the genetic chain between generations; they can to some extent—perhaps less than we think—be changed by conscious intelligent action; they change with the prevailing environment of costs and rewards, which mutates much faster than genetic change. Physically we are very similar to our ancestors of thirty thousand years, ago; culturally we have moved quite far away from them.

进化模型

Evolutionary Models

关于物种进化的方式，有两种生物学模型。科学正统理论是新达尔文主义。随机的基因变化会产生不同的物理形态。这些形态中的大多数对生存没有好处，例如白化黑鸟，这些形态往往会消失。其中少数形态有助于生存并在整个物种中传播。这一理论仍存在许多困难，科学家可能会在下个世纪解决这些问题，但随机性和有利适应性的生存是当前的科学正统理论，具有一定的解释力。另一种理论是二十世纪早期法国哲学家亨利·柏格森理论的一些变体，他认为自然具有某种非随机的创造目的，是一种寻求解决方案的智能力量。这一概念在大卫·莱泽和斯蒂芬·杰伊·古尔德等当代权威的著作中得到了呼应，他们强调遗传变异不仅仅是随机的，而且表现出明确的倾向。⁵⁰这并不是严格圣经意义上的神创论，但它避免了正统达尔文主义的许多问题。

There are two biological models of the way in which species evolve. The scientific orthodoxy is neo-Darwinist. Random genetic changes produce different physical forms. Most of these forms have no advantage to survival, as for instance the albino blackbird, and these tend to the out. A small number of them are helpful to survival and spread through the species. There are still many difficulties in this theory, which may be sorted out by scientists in the next century, but randomness and the survival of favorable adaptations are the current scientific orthodoxy and have some explanatory power. The alternative is some variant of the theory of the early twentieth century French philosopher Henri Bergson, who believed that nature had some nonrandom creative purpose, an intelligent force seeking solutions. This concept has echoes in the work of such contemporary authorities as David Layzer and Stephen Jay Gould, who have stressed that genetic variation is not simply random but shows definite propensities.⁵⁰ This is not creationism in its strict biblical sense, but it avoids many of the problems of orthodox Darwinism.

“社会生物学的重大理论贡献是将适应性的概念扩展到‘包容性适应性’。事实上，动物可以通过自身繁殖直接复制其基因，也可以通过与其共享特定比例基因的亲属繁殖间接复制其基因。因此，可以预期动物会采取合作行为，从而在遗传相关的范围内提高彼此的适应性。这就是亲属选择的含义。简而言之，动物是裙带关系，即它们更喜欢亲属而不是非亲属，更喜欢近亲而不是远亲。这可能是有意识的，就像人类一样，或者更常见的是无意识的。” ⁵¹

—皮埃尔·范登伯格​​​​

“The great theoretical contribution of sociobiology has been to extend the concept of fitness to that of ‘inclusive fitness.’ Indeed, an animal can duplicate its genes directly through its own reproduction, or indirectly through the reproduction of relatives with which it shares specific proportions of genes. Animals, therefore, can be expected to behave cooperatively, and thereby enhance each other’s fitness to the extent that they are genetically related. This is what is meant by kin selection. Animals, in short, are nepotistic, i.e., they prefer kin over non-kin, and close kin over distant kin. This may happen consciously, as in humans, or more commonly, unconsciously.”⁵¹

—PIERRE VAN DEN BERGHE

受遗传影响的动机因素​​

GENETICALLY INFLUENCED MOTIVATIONAL FACTORS

1963 年，WD Hamilton 在《利他行为的进化》中引入了“包容性适应度”的概念，进一步增强了生物学对人类行为的认识。Hamilton 认识到，虽然人类从根本上倾向于自我导向行为，但他们偶尔也会做出利他或自我牺牲的行为，而这些行为并没有带来明显的好处就个人生命而言。汉密尔顿试图通过假设最基本的最大化单位不是个体有机体而是基因来调和这些明显的矛盾。任何物种的个体都会寻求最大化，而不仅仅是他们自己的个人福祉，而是汉密尔顿所说的“包容性适应性”。他认为，“包容性适应性”不仅涉及达尔文意义上的个人生存，还涉及拥有相同基因的近亲的增强繁殖和生存。52^汉密尔顿的“包容性适应性”论题有助于阐明人类社会许多原本令人好奇的特征，包括民族国家的政治方面。

The biological perspective on human behavior was enhanced by the introduction of the concept of “inclusive fitness” in 1963 by W. D. Hamilton in “The Evolution of Altruistic Behavior.” Hamilton recognized that while humans are fundamentally given to self-oriented behavior, they also undertake occasional acts of altruism or self-sacrifice that offer no apparent benefits in terms of the life of the individual. Hamilton sought to reconcile these apparent contradictions by positing that the fundamental maximizing unit is not the individual organism but the gene. Individuals in any species will seek to maximize not simply their own personal well-being but what Hamilton called their “inclusive fitness.” He argued that “inclusive fitness” involves not only personal survival in the Darwinian sense, but also the enhanced reproduction and survival of close relatives who share the same genes.⁵² Hamilton’s “inclusive fitness” thesis helps illuminate many otherwise curious features of human societies, including aspects of politics in nation-states.

利他主义：用词不当还是化石亲属选择？

Altruism: Misnomer or Fossil Kin Selection?

根据范登伯格的说法，“利他主义主要针对亲属，尤其是近亲，事实上，这是一个误称。它代表了终极的遗传自私。它只是包容性适应度最大化的盲目表达。” ⁵³但这并不是说，没有汉密尔顿和范登伯格提到的近亲关系就没有利他主义。人类通过有性繁殖而不是无性克隆这一事实所带来的不确定性几乎可以保证，倾向于“包容性适应度最大化”会刺激大量“利他主义”，从而有利于除“自私基因”之外的等位基因。首先，总是存在这样的可能性，即某些采取帮助行动的人可能错误地认为他们是在帮助近亲。为后代采取牺​​牲行动的父亲实际上可能不是祖先，而可能只是认为自己是祖先。IV^这不仅仅是肥皂剧的主题；它说明了一个原始的难题——如果每个表面上的父亲都表现得“好像”他真的是父亲一样，尽管他可能不是父亲，那么“自私基因”的存活可能会更容易。

According to Van Den, Berghe, “Altruism, then, is directed mostly at kin, especially at close kin, and is, in fact, a misnomer. It represents the ultimate genetic selfishness. It is but the blind expression of inclusive fitness maximization.”⁵³ This is not to say, however, that there is no altruism absent the close genetic relationship referred to by Hamilton and Van Den Berghe. The uncertainties introduced by the fact that humans reproduce sexually rather than through asexual cloning all but guarantee that an inclination to “inclusive fitness maximization” would stimulate a good deal of “altruism” rebounding to the benefit of alleles other than the “selfish gene.” In the first instance, there is always the possibility that some persons who undertake helping actions may do so in the mistaken assumption that they are helping close kin. The father who undertakes a sacrificial action for his offspring may not, in fact, be the progenitor but may merely think he is.^IV This is not merely a theme for soap operas; it is illustrative of a primordial puzzle— that survival of the “selfish genes” is probably facilitated if each apparent father behaves “as if” he actually is the father, despite the possibility that he is not.

然而，正如赫什莱弗指出的那样，从正确的角度来看，“利他主义”的许多悖论都是语义上的混乱，经常使人们感到困惑或误导，使他们忽视竞争的背景，而“帮助”在竞争中可以带来生存优势：“‘如果利他主义的策略选择要在与非利他主义的竞争中生存，那么利他主义对自我生存的贡献就必须大于非利他主义，因此它不能真正是利他主义。’如果我们放弃‘利他主义’一词，转而问：可以称为帮助的完全客观现象的决定因素是什么？” ^{54，那么所有这些混乱都可以避免。}

Seen in their proper light, however, as Hirshleifer points out, many of the paradoxes of “altruism” are semantic muddles that frequently confuse or mislead people into losing sight of the context of competition in which “helping” could convey a survival advantage: “ ‘If an altruism choice of strategy is to be viable in competition with non-altruism, altruism must contribute to self-survival more than non-altruism does, and therefore it can’t really be altruism.’ All such muddles could be avoided if we drop the term ‘altruism’ and ask instead: What are the determinants of the entirely objective phenomenon that can be called helping?”⁵⁴

在“亲属帮助”的例子中，这个问题可能最有趣。汉密尔顿对包容性适应性的基本表述涉及生物学成本效益分析，其中个体或“控制帮助行为的基因”将自身相同副本的生存视为与自身生存同等重要的价值。因此，提供帮助的意愿（更不用说牺牲）会随着另一个人拥有相同基因的机会而变化。“具体来说，亲属帮助基因指示一个人（在其他条件相同的情况下）如果可以拯救两个兄弟姐妹、四个同父异母兄弟姐妹、八个堂兄弟姐妹等，就献出自己的生命。” ⁵⁵

This question is perhaps most interesting in the case of “kinship helping.” Hamilton’s basic formulation of inclusive fitness involved a biological cost-benefit analysis in which an individual, or “the gene controlling helping behaviour,” values the survival of an identical copy of itself equally to its own survival. Therefore, the willingness to undertake helping, let alone sacrifice, varies with the chance that another individual has an identical gene. “Specifically, a gene for kinship helping instructs a man (other things equal) to give his life if he can thereby save two siblings, four half-siblings, eight cousins, etc.”⁵⁵

包容性适应度的概率问题​

PROBABILITY PROBLEMS OF INCLUSIVE FITNESS

虽然这种生物学原理在原则上似乎很清晰，但仔细研究后会发现它掩盖了许多困难。例如，一个人的兄弟姐妹或孩子可能有 50% 的概率拥有相同的基因，但严格来说，这并不意味着他们身上确实有这种基因。每个人都携带两组基因，一组来自父亲，一组来自母亲。但这当然意味着，父母携带的基因中只有一半必然存在于后代中。此外，生殖过程中总是存在突变的风险，尽管这种风险不太可能发生，但却降低了遗传成本效益分析的确定性。因此，如果认真对待“基因作为优化器”的比喻，那么父亲不是祖先的情况只是一个更广泛问题的最明确的例子。如果确实是为了“自私基因”的生存，通过为近亲牺牲来实现最大化，那么任何导致另一个等位基因取代“自私基因”相同副本的可能性都可以看作是大自然对自己玩的复杂把戏之一。

While this biologic seems clear in principle, upon closer examination it disguises a number of difficulties. For example, the fact that one’s siblings or children may have a 50 percent probability of sharing an identical gene does not, in strict logic, mean that it is actually expressed in them. Every individual carries two sets of each gene, one from, the father and one from the mother. But this, of course, means that only half of the genes carried by an individual parent are necessarily present in offspring. Furthermore, there is always the risk of mutation in reproduction, which, unlikely though it may be, reduces the certainty of genetic cost-benefit analysis. So if the metaphor of “gene as optimizer” is taken seriously, the case of the pater who is not the progenitor is only the most clear-cut example of a broader problem. If it is indeed the survival of the “selfish gene” that is optimized by sacrificing for near-relatives, then any possibility that results in the substitution of another allele for the identical copy of the “selfish gene” may be considered one of those intricate tricks that Mother Nature plays on herself.

不确定的后果

Uncertain Consequences

因此，针对亲属的利他主义会带来问题。不仅存在“自私基因”的概率问题，即其宿主的明显亲属实际上可能不共享其相同的副本。在不确定的情况下，还很难确定任何特定的牺牲行为实际上是否主要使亲属受益而不是他人。（主要使他人受益的牺牲实际上可能会损害自私基因的包容性适应性，因为它会降低其在后续种群中出现的可能性。）考虑一个在我们写作时受到新闻启发的可怕例子。假设苏格兰邓布兰的一位家长在短时间内得知一名持枪疯子正前往当地一所学校，明显意图造成伤害。通过立即采取行动，他或她可以承担勇敢但可能注定失败的姿态，与疯子对抗，从而可能拯救他在学校的孩子。

Altruism directed toward kin therefore involves problems. Not only is there the probability problem for the “selfish gene” that apparent relatives of its host may not, in fact, share its identical copies. There is also the difficulty of determining under conditions of uncertainty whether any given gesture of sacrifice will, in fact, primarily benefit relatives rather than others. (Sacrifice that primarily benefits others may actually harm the inclusive fitness of the selfish gene by reducing the prospects that it will be represented in succeeding populations.) Consider an awful example inspired by the news while we were writing. Suppose a parent in Dunblane, Scotland, learned on short notice that an armed lunatic was heading into a local school with the apparent intention of doing harm. By acting instantly, he or she could undertake the heroic but possibly doomed gesture of confronting the lunatic, and thereby possibly save his or her children at the school.

或者可能不是。

Or possibly not.

即使是一个残忍的疯子，意图杀死地球上的每个孩子，在弹药耗尽或被其他人制服之前，他所能造成的伤害也是有限的。如果牺牲的父母决定不干预，他的孩子很可能无论如何都会幸存下来，就像学校里的大多数孩子一样。所有英勇的牺牲行为所阻止的伤害可能都会落在别人的孩子身上。因此，如果冒着生命危险，主要是为了别人的孩子，这位父亲或母亲实际上可能降低了他的“包容性适应性”。如果他的所有孩子都失去了父母中的一位，他可能会让这些孩子在达尔文主义斗争中处于更糟糕的境地。

Even a ruthless lunatic intent on killing every child on the planet would be limited in the harm he could do before running short of ammunition or being subdued by others. Had the sacrificing parent decided not to intervene, more likely than not his children would have survived in any event, as most children at the school did. All the harm that a gallant act of sacrifice would have prevented probably would otherwise have fallen on the children of others. So by risking his or her life, primarily for the children of others, the father or mother in question might actually have reduced his “inclusive fitness.” By depriving all his children of one of their parents, he would probably have left those children in a worsened position in the Darwinian struggle.

虽然这无疑是一个牵强的例子，但它也是现实的。它反映了这样一个事实：生活中有无数的情况，大大小小的帮助行为都会产生有益的影响。在许多情况下，这种行为的直接受益者很难被孤立到近亲中。具有讽刺意味的是，正如我们下面所考虑的，这可能是生存优势的一部分，使那些具有较少辨别力的帮助基因​​的人能够忍受数千年的不愉快，直到现在。

While this is admittedly a strained example, it is also realistic. It reflects the fact that there are countless circumstances in life in which large or small acts of helping have beneficial effects. In many cases, the direct beneficiaries of such actions cannot be easily isolated to closely related kin. And ironically, as we consider below, this may be part of the survival benefit that enabled those with less discriminate helping genes to endure all the millennia of unpleasantness until now.

利他主义和遗传惯性

Altruism and Genetic Inertia

如果像我们认为的那样，“自私基因”论题准确地概括了人类行为的动机，那么认为它所引发的帮助或牺牲行为只能狭隘地、仅仅为了亲属的利益就太简单了。在某些情况下，知识的不完善使得区分亲属成为一门不确定的艺术。即使假设亲属已知，任何给定的“自私基因”在亲属群体中的实际表现也只能通过概率问题来确定。直到最近，区分个体之间的实际遗传标记仍然是不可能的。而且，我们距离能够实际区分哪些近亲实际上表达了优化其生存的“自私基因”还有一段距离。除此之外，将利益限制在亲属而不是其他人身上的难度更大。

If, as we believe, the “selfish gene” thesis is an accurate approximation of what motivates human action, it would be too simple to suppose that the helping or sacrificial behavior it engenders could operate narrowly and solely for the benefit of actual relatives. Imperfect knowledge makes distinguishing kin an uncertain art in some circumstances. And even assuming that kin were known, actual representation of any given “selfish gene” in the population of kin could not be ascertained as more than a matter of probabilities. Until recently, it would have been impossible to distinguish actual genetic markers among individuals. And we are still some distance from being able to practically distinguish which near-relatives actually express whatever “selfish gene” is optimizing its survival. Beyond that is the greater difficulty of confining benefits to kin rather than others.

此外，经验也表明，如果没有合适的亲属，人类有时会将“养育本能”用于非亲属。最明显的例子是父母对领养孩子的行为，甚至是某些通常没有孩子的人对家养宠物的行为。这些人为了救出困在树上的猫而受到严重伤害甚至死亡的情况并不罕见。当然，在任何一年中，都有不少人死于宠物闯入危险，以某种方式引发家庭事故。宠物的情况更是如此，领养儿童的情况更是如此。毫不夸张地说，领养儿童的父母经常把他们“当成”亲人一样对待，这赋予了“亲属选择”这一概念另一种含义。

Furthermore, it is also obvious from experience that humans sometimes divert their “nurturing instincts” for the benefit of nonkin if appropriate kin are unavailable. The most clear-cut example of this is the behavior of parents toward adopted children, or even the behavior of certain persons, usually childless, toward their household pets. It is not unheard of for such individuals to court serious injury and even death to rescue cats trapped in a tree. Certainly, in any given year, a not-insignificant number of persons perish in household accidents precipitated in some fashion by pets who find their way into jeopardy. What is true of pets is more true of adoptive children. It is certainly not a stretch to say that parents of adopted children often treat them “as if” they were kin, thus giving the concept of “kin selection” another meaning.

这些案例并没有像一些批评者希望的那样使“自私基因”理论失去信誉。恰恰相反。我们看到一些例子，人们的行为“好像”是为了近亲牺牲，以促进他们自身的包容性适应性，这是“遗传惰性”的例子。换句话说，它们反映了霍华德·马戈利斯在《自私、利他主义和理性》一书中指出的事实，即“人类社会的变化速度”比人类基因构成的速度要快。因此，人们继续表现得“基本上就像生活在一个小的狩猎采集群体中一样”。56^正如范登伯格所说，这种群体的一个关键特征是

Such cases do not discredit the “selfish gene” theory as much as some critics would wish. To the contrary. We see examples of people behaving “as if” they were sacrificing for close relatives to advance their own inclusive fitness, as instances of “genetic inertia.” In other words, they reflect the fact, noted by Howard Margolis in Selfishness, Altruism and Rationality, that “human society changed faster” than human genetic makeup. People, therefore, continue to act “substantially as if living in a small hunter-gatherer group.”⁵⁶ A crucial characteristic of such groups was, as Van Den Berghe put it, that

他们是由几百人组成的小型近亲繁殖群体……部落成员虽然细分为较小的亲属群体，但他们将自己视为一个民族，团结一致对抗外界，并通过亲属关系和婚姻网络相互联系，使部落实际上成为一个超级家庭。高近亲繁殖率确保大多数配偶也是亲属。” ⁵⁷

They were small in-bred populations of a few hundred individuals.… Members of the tribe, though subdivided into smaller kin groups, saw themselves as a single people, solidary against the outside world, and interlinked by a web of kinship and marriage making the tribe in fact a superfamily. A high rate of inbreeding assured that most spouses were also kinsmen.”⁵⁷

简而言之，在农业出现之前，人类的所有族群都是“近亲繁殖的超级家族”。鉴于过去家庭与群体之间的这种身份认同，很可能存在一种受遗传影响的倾向，即将群体视为亲属。很容易想象，这种行为在过去可能具有生存价值，当时“近亲繁殖的超级家族”的每个成员都是亲属。正如马戈利斯所说，很容易想象，对于“如此小的、关系密切的狩猎采集者群体，除了任何互惠或报复的可能性之外，包容性的自私自利本身就足以支持一定程度的群体利益承诺。然后，人们可以争辩说，某种群体利益动机倾向以一种化石亲属利他主义的形式存在……” ⁵⁸换句话说，由于我们保留了狩猎采集者的基因组成，我们对群体内的行为反映了一种“利他主义”，这种“利他主义”有望优化由“近亲繁殖超级家族”组成的群体的生存成功率。

In short, for all of human existence prior to the advent of agriculture, ethnic groups were “inbreeding superfamilies.” Given this past identity between the family and the in-group, there could well be a genetically influenced tendency to treat the in-group as kin. It is easy to imagine that such behavior could have had survival value in the past when every member of the “inbreeding superfamily” was kin. As Margolis suggests, it is easy to imagine that for “such small bands of hunter-gatherers, closely related, that inclusive selfishness (aside from any prospect of reciprocity or vengeance) would alone support a measure of commitment to group-interest. One can then argue that some tendency to group-interested motivation survives as a kind of fossil kin-altruism…”⁵⁸ In other words, because we retain the genetic makeup of hunter-gatherers, our behavior toward in-groups reflects the kind of “altruism” that would be expected to optimize the survival success of in-groups comprised by “inbreeding superfamilies.”

据推测，正如马戈利斯所推测的那样，这种源于“化石亲属利他主义”或遗传惰性的群体利益行为倾向，促成了智人的生存，“而其他类人生物种则灭绝了” ^。59

Presumably, as Margolis speculates, this tendency for group-interested behavior, arising from “fossil kin-altruism” or genetic inertia, contributed to the survival of Homo sapiens “while other humanoid species went extinct.”⁵⁹

后生

Epigenesis

我们认为这种“好像”行为是“表观遗传”的一个典型例子，即受基因影响的动机因素倾向于天生偏见人类倾向于某些选择，而不是其他选择。换句话说，人类的思维不是白板，也不是一张白纸，而是一个硬盘，上面有预先连接的电路，使某些反应比其他反应更容易学习和更有吸引力。因此，有观点认为，思维倾向于从激起敌意或敌意的外群体和通常只对亲属抱有极大友好或忠诚的内群体的角度来思考^。60

We see this “as if” behavior as a prime example of “epigenesis,” or the tendency of genetically influenced motivational factors to innately bias humans to favor certain choices over others. In other words, the human mind is not a tabula rasa, or blank slate, but a hard drive with prewired circuits that make certain responses more readily learned and attractive than others. Thus the proposition that the mind is disposed to think in terms of an out-group that excites enmity or hostility and an in-group to which one feels great amity or loyalty usually reserved for kin.⁶⁰

这种与内群体相处就像与近亲相处一样的表观遗传倾向，造成了易受操纵的弱点，民族主义者常常利用这种弱点来获得对国家的牺牲支持。从这个意义上说，各地的民族主义宣传都以亲属关系的词汇为幌子，这并非巧合。

This epigenetic tendency to behave with an in-group as if it comprised close relatives creates a vulnerability to manipulation that has commonly been exploited by nationalists to engender sacrificial support for the state. In that sense, it is not a coincidence that nationalist propaganda everywhere is dressed up in the vocabulary of kinship.

“美丽的法国用大炮的轰鸣声召唤她的孩子们站起来。我们周围的士兵正在武装自己。继续，继续，我们的母亲在哭泣。” ⁶¹

—法国士兵的歌声​

“By the voice of her cannon alarming, fair France bids her children arise. Soldiers around us are arming. On, on, ’tis our mother who cries.”⁶¹

—CHANT OF FRENCH SOLDIERS

虚假亲属关系

Bogus Kinship

想想世界各地的政客都倾向于借用亲属关系中的术语来描述国家。国家是“我们的祖国”或“我们的祖国”。它的公民是“我们”、“家庭成员”、我们的“兄弟姐妹”。62^在我们看来，法国、中国和埃及等文化差异巨大的国家都使用这样的比喻，这并不是修辞上的巧合，而是“后成”的一个典型例子，即受基因影响的动机因素倾向于使人类天生偏向某些选择。

Consider the strong tendency of politicians everywhere to describe the state in terms borrowed from kinship. The nation is “our fatherland” or “our motherland.” Its citizens are “we,” “members of the family,” our “brothers and sisters.”⁶² The fact that states as culturally different as France, China, and Egypt employ such similes is not a rhetorical coincidence, as we see it, but a prime example of “epigenesis” or the tendency of genetically influenced motivational factors to innately bias humans to favor certain choices.

这种后生性如何发挥作用？用于控制对民族国家的情感忠诚度的认同机制利用了各种手段，这些手段在原始时代可能是亲属关系的标志，“将个人的包容性适应性关注”与国家利益联系起来。63^例如，Shaw 和 Wong 关注现代民族国家用来动员其人口反对外来群体的五种认同手段。这些是：

How does this epigenesis work? The identification mechanism employed to harness emotional loyalty to the nation-state makes use of various devices that would have been markers of kinship in the primitive past “to link the individual’s inclusive fitness concerns” with the interests of the state.⁶³ For example, Shaw and Wong focus on five identification devices used by modern nation-states to mobilize their populations against out-groups. These are:

1. 共同语言
2. a common language
3. 共同的家园
4. a shared homeland
5. 相似的表型特征
6. similar phenotypic characteristics
7. 共同的宗教遗产和
8. a shared religious heritage and
9. ^共同血统的信仰
10. the belief of common descent⁶⁴

当然，这些特征在原始时代就已经使核心族群脱颖而出。民族主义的吸引力很大程度上可以追溯到这些识别手段被采用和用亲属语言包装起来的方式，正如上文引用的法国士兵的口号所表明的那样。这种将国家称为“祖国”或“祖国”的动员手段在世界各地很常见，因为它们很有效。

Such characteristics, of course, would have distinguished the nucleus ethnic group in the primitive past. Much of the appeal of nationalism can be traced to the way that these identification devices have been adopted and dressed up in the language of kinship, as illustrated in the French soldiers’ chant quoted above. Such mobilization devices, which refer to the state as the “fatherland” or the “motherland,” are common worldwide because they work.

基因会计

Genetic Accounting

就国家而言，这些亲属关系的虚构特征表现为它们不具备实际亲属关系所具有的任何可变程度。即使在大家庭中，每个人都有亲属关系，但每个人的亲属程度也不同。父母和兄弟姐妹是最亲近的亲属，祖父母和堂兄弟姐妹关系较疏远，远房表兄弟姐妹之间的亲属关系非常疏远，他们拥有任何共同基因的可能性几乎不比完全陌生的人高。丈夫和妻子通常不再像石器时代那样密切相关。无论如何，所有实际的亲属关系都可以用数学术语定义为“亲属系数”，汉密尔顿将其计算为基因重叠的度量^。65

The imaginary character of these kinship links as far as the state is concerned is evidenced by the fact that they possess none of the degrees of variability that characterize actual kinship. Even in extended families, where everyone is related, not everyone is related to the same degree. Parents and siblings are the closest relations, grandparents and cousins are less close, with distant, kissing cousins so remote that they are barely more likely than complete strangers to share any given gene in common. Husbands and wives generally are no longer closely related, as they tended to be in the Stone Age. In any event, all actual kinship is definable in mathematical terms as the “coefficient of relatedness,” which Hamilton calculated as a measure of genetic overlap.⁶⁵

相比之下，民族“家庭”被想象为与国家领土维度完全一致且具有弹性。民族性像液体一样均匀地延伸到严格界定的边界内的每个缝隙中。本尼迪克特·安德森写道：“在现代观念中，国家主权在每一平方厘米的法定划定领土上都充分、平坦且均匀地发挥作用。” ⁶⁶当然，当谈到为国家做出牺牲时，想象的关联系数始终为 1。

By contrast, the national “family” is imagined to be totally and elastically coincident with the state’s territorial dimensions. Nationality extends uniformly, like a liquid, into every crevice within the strictly defined boundaries. Benedict Anderson writes, “In the modern conception, state sovereignty is fully, flatly and evenly operative over each square centimeter of a legally demarcated territory.”⁶⁶ And, of course, when it comes to sacrifice for the state, the coefficient of imaginary relatedness is always one.

将包容性适应与民族国家联系起来是件很有趣的事，因为它可以帮助人们了解人类欢迎或抵制新千年变化的倾向。正如我们之前所探讨的，在信息时代之前，所有类型的社会都是以领土为基础的。它们要么围绕核心族群的本土领土形成，要么像民族国家一样，利用群体团结的相同动机来动员力量保卫当地领土免受外来者的侵扰。在每种情况下，人们都将自己领土之外的陌生人视为敌人。考虑到原始时代的亲属选择假设，这是有道理的。当人类以目前的基因形式出现时，部落成员是近亲。他们是核心族群的成员，即“近亲繁殖超级家族”。

This identification of inclusive fitness with the nation-state is interesting because it could help inform the disposition of humans to welcome or resist the changes of the new millennium. As we have explored earlier, prior to the Information Age all types of society were territorially based. They either formed around the home territory of the nucleus ethnic group, or, as with the nation-state, played upon the same motives of group solidarity to mobilize force for defense of a local territory against outsiders. In every case, it was the stranger outside of one’s immediate territory who was feared as the enemy. Given the assumptions of kin selection in the primordial past, this made sense. When humanity emerged in its current genetic form, members of the tribe were close kin. They were members of a nucleus ethnic group, “the inbreeding superfamily.”

此外，考虑到亲属选择的必要性，个人有权决定繁荣与否，这确实存在一个实际的经济原因。直系亲属的生存与他的部落或超家族的生存息息相关。狩猎采集部落的成员的繁荣确实取决于整个部落的成功。没有独立的财产，也没有任何方式让个人或家庭脱离部落而能够生存和繁荣。这将个人的自身利益与群体的利益紧密联系在一起。用赫什莱弗的话来说，“如果一个群体的成员有着共同的命运或结果，那么互相帮助就变成了自助。” ⁶⁷

Furthermore, there really was a practical economic reason, given the imperatives of kin selection, for the individual to identify the prosperity and survival of immediate kin with that of his tribe, or superfamily. A member of a hunter-gatherer tribe really did depend for his prosperity upon the success of the whole tribe. There was no independent property, nor any way that an individual or family could plausibly have hoped to survive and prosper if detached from the tribe. This strongly linked the individual’s self-interest to that of the group. In Hirshleifer’s words, “To the extent that members of a group share a common fate or outcome, helping one another becomes self-help.”⁶⁷

“显然，原始人——洛夫杜人可以被视为数百个类似民族的代表——认为，在任何一个时间点，每个人的处境都是完全平等的，这是一种社会规范。”

—H ELMUT S CHOECK

“Evidently primitive man—and the Lovedu can be regarded as representative of hundreds of similar peoples—considers as the norm a society in which, at any one moment of time, everyone’s situation is precisely equal.”

—HELMUT SCHOECK

新环境，旧基因

New Circumstances, Old Genes

如今，微技术正在促成与我们在石器时代遗传下来的条件截然不同的条件的产生。信息技术正在创造经济不平等，其程度远远超出了我们的祖先在原始平等的石器时代所经历的一切。信息技术还创造了超越领土的资产，这将有助于颠覆群体内部的民族国家。具有讽刺意味的是，这些新的网络资产可能正是因为它们建立在远离家乡的地方而具有更高的价值。如果信息技术在富裕工业国家日益普及，从而导致经济不平等，并引发我们所预期的强烈反弹，情况就更是如此。这一事实往往会使远距离持有的资产更有价值。它们不仅不会受到嫉妒，而且更有可能被置于个人必须应对的最具掠夺性的群体——他自己的民族国家——的触及范围之外。

Now microtechnology is facilitating the creation of very different conditions from those to which we were genetically disposed by the conditions of the Stone Age. Information technology is creating economic inequality magnitudes outside the range of anything experienced by our ancestors in the pristinely egalitarian Stone Age. Information technology is also creating supraterritorial assets, which will help to subvert the embodiment of the in-group, the nation-state. Ironically, these new cyberassets will probably be of higher value precisely because they are established at a distance from home. All the more so if there is an invidious backlash of the kind we expect against the economic inequality arising from increasing penetration of information technology in the rich industrial countries. That very fact would tend to make assets held at long distance more valuable. They would not only be less exposed to envy, they would be more likely to be put beyond the reach of the most predatory group with which an individual must cope—his own nation-state.

自然不经济与民族主义

Diseconomies of Nature and Nationalism

或许，后生论在影响人们态度方面的重要性体现在人们很少注意到内群体认同与现代民族国家之间的讽刺关系。现代时期的暴力逻辑往往会混淆最初导致人们将适应性与内群体联系起来的冲动。为什么？因为与其在敌对的环境中促进近亲的生存和繁荣，不如在敌对的环境中促进近亲的生存和繁荣。世界上，将个人的“包容性适应性”与国家内群体联系起来，会削弱个人可能做出的任何牺牲的价值，使其对亲属而言微不足道。典型的现代民族国家实在太大，无法让个人与宣称拥有他的国家的其他公民之间具有统计上显著的“亲属系数”。不仅内群体中近亲的比例从石器时代的几乎一致急剧下降到二十世纪的化学痕迹；而且在大多数情况下，个人公民与国家其他成员之间的“亲属系数”不会比整个人类高得多。一个拥有数千万甚至数亿人（或就中国人而言，超过十亿成员）的“内群体”变得如此庞大，以至于将任何牺牲或利益的包容性适应性效应稀释到大海中的一角。因此，从严格的逻辑上讲，与石器时代的狩猎采集者不同，现代民族主义者不能合理地期望他的“内部群体”做出任何牺牲或帮助，以有意义的方式提高他的家人的生存前景。

It is perhaps a mark of the importance of epigenesis in informing attitudes that so little notice has been taken of the ironies of in-group identification as it relates to the modern nation-state. The logic of violence in the modern period tended to confound the very impulse that gave rise to the tendency to identify fitness with the in-group in the first place. Why? Because rather than facilitating the survival and prosperity of near-relatives in a hostile world, the identification of the individual’s “inclusive fitness” with a national in-group diluted the value of any act of sacrifice the individual might have made to the level of insignificance for his kin. The typical modern nation-state was simply too large to allow for a statistically significant “coefficient of relatedness” between the individual and other citizens of the nation that laid claim to him. Not only was the proportion of close relatives within the in-group sharply diminished from almost unity in the Stone Age to a bare chemical trace in the twentieth century; the “coefficient of relatedness” between the individual citizen and the rest of the nation would not, in most cases, have been significantly higher than with the whole human race. An “in-group” with tens of millions or even hundreds of millions (or in the case of the Chinese, more than a billion members) became so gigantic as to dilute the inclusive fitness effect of any sacrifice or benefit conveyed to the scale of a spit in the ocean. In strict logic, therefore, the modern nationalist, unlike the hunter-gatherer of the Stone Age, could not reasonably expect any gesture of sacrifice or helping for his “in-group” to enhance the survival prospects for his family in a meaningful way.

尽管国民经济已成为现代社会衡量福祉的基本核算单位，但阻碍有才华的个人成功以及其亲属成功的最大障碍是以国家、团体本身的名义强加的负担。至少对于那些主要从事互惠而非强制性社会活动的人来说，情况确实如此——重新审视范登伯格的人类行为分类^。68

Notwithstanding the fact that national economies became the fundamental units of account in which well-being was measured in the modem era, the largest obstacle to the talented individual’s success, and therefore to that of his kin, became the burdens imposed in the name of the nation, the in-group itself. This, at least, was true for those primarily engaged in reciprocal rather than coercive sociality—to revisit Van Den Berghe’s categories of human behavior.⁶⁸

民族国家的逻辑表明，公民身份的最终代价是牺牲和死亡。正如简·贝思克·埃尔斯坦所观察到的，民族国家对公民灌输的思想更多的是牺牲而不是侵略：“年轻人参战不是为了杀人，而是为了死亡，为了牺牲自己的身体，为了整个大团体，即政治团体。” ⁶⁹纳税人牺牲的冲动同样强烈。纳税，就像携带武器一样，是一种义务，而不是一种交换，在这种交换中，人们放弃金钱来获得同等或更高价值的产品或服务。这一点在普通话语中得到了承认。人们谈论“税收负担”时，不会谈论购买营养品的“食物负担”，购买汽车的“汽车负担”，或旅行的“假期负担”，正是因为商业购买通常是公平的交换。否则，买家不会这样做。

The logic of the nation-state suggests that the ultimate price of citizenship is sacrifice and death. As Jane Bethke Elshtain observed, nation-states indoctrinate citizens more for sacrifice than aggression: “The young man goes to war not so much to kill as to die, to forfeit his particular body for that of the large body, the body politic.”⁶⁹ The impulse to sacrifice is no less active where the taxpayer is concerned. Paying taxes, like bearing arms, is a duty, rather than an exchange in which one forgoes money to obtain some product or service of an equal or greater value. This much is acknowledged in common speech. People speak of a “tax burden” as they do not speak of the “food burden” of shopping for nutriments, or the “car burden” of purchasing an automobile, or a “vacation burden” for traveling, precisely because commercial purchases are generally fair exchanges. Otherwise, the buyers would not make them.

在这方面，民族主义表明后生论如何颠覆达尔文“自然经济”的逻辑。民族国家促进了系统性的、基于领土的掠夺。与石器时代的狩猎采集者面临的情况不同，20 世纪末个体的主要寄生虫和掠夺者不太可能是“外来者”，即外国敌人，而是“群体内”的假定体现，即地方民族国家本身。因此，在信息时代，超越领土的资产的出现所提供的主要优势恰恰是，这些资产可以置于地方民族国家动员的系统性强制措施的范围之外，而地方民族国家是主权个人居住的领土。

In this respect, nationalism shows how epigenesis can reverse the logic of the Darwinian “economy of nature.” The nation-state facilitated systematic, territorially based predation. Unlike the situation faced by hunter-gatherers in the Stone Age, the main parasite and predator upon the individual at the end of the twentieth century was not likely to be the “outsider,” the foreign enemy, but rather the presumed embodiment of the “in-group,” the local nation-state itself. Thus the main advantage offered by the advent of assets that transcend territoriality in the Information Age is precisely the fact that such assets can be placed beyond the reach of the systematic coercion mobilized by the local nation-state in whose territory the would-be Sovereign Individual was resident.

如果我们的观点是正确的，那么微技术将使个人在技术上在很大程度上摆脱从属公民身份的负担。在新的“虚拟城市”中，他们将成为自己以外的国家主权者，而不是臣民，通过合同或私人条约效忠，这种方式更像前现代欧洲，商人获得商业条约和特许状以保护自己“免受任意没收财产”并获得“封建法豁免”。70^在网络文化中，成功人士将因出生意外而获得公民义务豁免。他们不再倾向于认为自己主要是英国人或美国人。他们将成为全世界的外国居民，只是恰好居住在一个或多个地方。

If our view is correct, microtechnology will make it technically feasible for individuals to largely escape from the burdens of subordinate citizenship. They will be extranational sovereigns over themselves, not subjects, in the new “Virtual City,” owing allegiance by contract or private treaty in a fashion more reminiscent of premodern Europe, where merchants secured commercial treaties and charters to protect themselves “from arbitrary seizures of property” and to obtain “exemption from seigneurial law.”⁷⁰ In the cyberculture, successful persons will gain exemption from duties of citizenship arising from an accident of birth. They will no longer tend to think of themselves primarily as British or American. They will be extranational residents of the whole world who just happen to abide in one or more of its localities.

网络经济与我们的基因传承​​​

THE CYBERECONOMY AND OUR GENETIC INHERITANCE

然而，问题在于，这一技术奇迹及其所蕴含的经济奇迹——摆脱地域专制——取决于个人是否愿意将自己的大部分财富和未来托付给陌生人。当然，在严格的基因计算中，这些陌生人的基因亲近程度并不一定低于近几个世纪以来我们不得不依赖的大多数“同胞”。

The hitch, however, is that this technological miracle and the economic miracle it implies—escaping the tyranny of place—depend upon the willingness of individuals to entrust much of their wealth and futures to strangers. In strict genetic accounting, of course, those strangers would not necessarily be less genetically close than most of our “fellow citizens” upon whom in recent centuries we have been bound to depend.

问题在于，在民族国家中，群体和睦产生的反常结果对网络经济来说是负面还是正面的指标。那些即将失去强制性再分配利益的“遗留者”会不会把民族国家的消亡当成是对亲人的攻击？新千年的第一个 25 年将会告诉我们答案。情绪反应可能很复杂。20 世纪有 1.15 亿人为民族国家而战，这一事实是后生力量的明显证据。71^这表明许多人确实认为民族的生存是生死攸关的大事。问题是这种态度是否会延续到具有不同超级政治要求的新时代。

The question is whether the perverse results of in-group amity in the case of the nation-state are negative or positive indicators for the cybereconomy. Will the “left-behinds” who stand to lose the benefits of coercive redistribution treat the death of the nation-state as as if it were an attack on kin? The first quarter century of the new millennium will tell. The emotional reactions could be complex. The fact that 115 million persons gave their lives fighting for nation-states in the twentieth century is stark evidence of the power of epigenesis.⁷¹ It shows that many did consider the survival of their nations to be matters of life-and-death importance. The question is whether that attitude will carry over into a new age with different megapolitical imperatives.

受基因影响的为民族国家而做出的牺牲，往往会违背亲属选择的进化目的，这一事实也表明，人类具有足够的适应能力，可以适应许多情况。在石器时代的条件下，我们并没有被基因编程。正如塔奇在描述人类的“极端普遍性”时所阐述的那样：“我们是图灵机的动物等价物：可以用于任何任务的通用设备。” ⁷²在即将到来的转型危机中，哪种趋势会浮出水面？可能两者都有。

The fact that genetically influenced sacrifice on behalf of the nation-state often militated against the evolutionary purpose of kin selection also tells you that humans are adaptable enough to adjust to many circumstances for which we were not genetically programmed in the conditions of the Stone Age. As Tudge elaborates in describing the “extreme generalness” of human beings: “We are the animal equivalent of the Turing machine: the universal device that can be turned to any task.”⁷² Which tendency will come to the surface in the coming transition crisis? Probably both.

主权本身的商业化取决于数十万主权个人和数百万其他人是否愿意将资产投入“无处不在的第一银行”，以确保免受直接强制。这种信任在原始时代没有明显的类似物。石器时代的资产很少。那些确实存在的资产都被部落控制着，部落是一个对外来者心存疑虑的“近亲繁殖超级家族”。然而，尽管网络经济在进化上是新颖的，但它让人类有机会表达我们最新的遗传基因——伴随着我们超大大脑而来的智慧。信息精英们肯定足够聪明，一眼就能认出好东西。

The commercialization of sovereignty itself depends upon the willingness of hundreds of thousands of Sovereign Individuals and many millions of others to deploy their assets in the “First Bank of Nowhere” in order to secure immunity from direct compulsion. This type of trust has no obvious analogue in the primordial past. There were few assets in the Stone Age. Those that did exist were hoarded under the control of a tribe, an “inbreeding superfamily” that was paranoid about outsiders. Yet notwithstanding the evolutionary novelty of the cybereconomy, it gives humans the chance to express our most novel genetic inheritance—the intelligence that comes along with our outsized brains. Those among the information elite will certainly be smart enough to recognize a good thing when they see one.

此外，创造基本不受掠夺影响的资产实际上应该以切实可行的方式反弹，以提高主权个人的“包容性适应度”。虽然参与网络经济的经济逻辑颠覆了民族国家的基本原理，但它是令人信服的，尤其是对于高技能人士而言。

Further, the creation of assets that are largely immune to predation should actually rebound in a practical way to increase the “inclusive fitness” of Sovereign Individuals. While the economic logic of participating in the cybereconomy turns the rationales of the nation-state upside down, it is compelling, especially for persons of high skills.

为了在跨司法管辖区购物时获得最大优势，个人必须愿意离开民族国家，将个人保护委托给其他司法管辖区的警察，或者在某些情况下，委托给主要受市场激励驱动的安全人员，而这些安全人员可能远离他们的出生和成长地。这意味着多语言和文化国际化而非沙文主义具有显著优势。这进一步意味着，任何认真实现网络经济为自己和家人带来解放潜力的人，都应该开始在除其主要商业生涯期间居住的司法管辖区以外的几个司法管辖区争取欢迎。有关更多详细信息，请参阅附录中有关实现独立策略的讨论。

In order to optimize their advantage in shopping among jurisdictions, individuals must be willing to exit the nation-state and entrust their personal protection to police in another jurisdiction, or in some cases, to security personnel motivated mainly by market incentives in areas that may be distant from where they were born and reared. This implies a significant advantage in being multilingual and cosmopolitan in culture rather than jingoistic. And it further implies that anyone who is serious about realizing the liberating potential of the cybereconomy for himself and his family should begin to stake out a welcome for himself in several jurisdictions other than that in which he has resided during his main business career. For more details, see our discussion of strategies for achieving independence in the appendices.

真正的亲和力

Genuine Affinities

一种新的对世界的理解和一种新的确定自己在这个世界中的位置的方式可能会改变人类文化的习惯，即使不是我们与生俱来的倾向。我们期望在新千年看到新的身份认同方程式，这可能会使人们更容易适应新世界。与国籍不同，新的身份认同不会是民族国家和民族国家之间系统性强制的产物。二十世纪普遍存在的民族国家体系。在即将到来的新时代，社区和联盟将不受领土限制。身份识别将更准确地针对真正的亲和力、共同利益或实际的亲属关系，而不是传统政治中如此孜孜不倦地提倡的虚假的公民亲和力。保护将以新的方式组织，而这些方式在划定领土边界的测量员工具包中是没有的。资产将越来越多地存放在网络空间，而不是任何给定的地方，这一事实将促进新的竞争，以减少大多数领土管辖区征收的“保护成本”或税收。

A new extranational understanding of the world and a new way of identifying one’s place in it could change the habits of human culture, if not our inbred inclinations. The new extranational equation of identity that we expect to see take hold in the new millennium could make it easier to adopt to the new world than may seem likely. Unlike nationality, the new identities will not be a product of the systematic compulsion that made nation-states and the nation-state system universal in the twentieth century. In the new age to come, communities and allegiances will not be territorially bounded. Identification will be more precisely targeted to genuine affinities, shared interests, or actual kinship, rather than the bogus affinities of citizenship so tirelessly promoted in conventional politics. Protection will be organized in new ways that have no analogue in a surveyor’s kit that demarcates territorial borders. Assets will increasingly be lodged in cyberspace rather than at any given place, a fact that will facilitate new competition to reduce the “protection costs” or taxes imposed in most territorial jurisdictions.

“有抱负的人明白，迁徙的生活方式是取得成功的代价。” ⁷³

—克里斯托弗·拉斯奇

“Ambitious people understand, then, that a migratory way of life is the price of getting ahead.”⁷³

—CHRISTOPHER LASCH

逃离民族国家​​​

ESCAPE FROM THE NATION-STATE

尽管民族国家作为“内群体”牢牢地控制着现代人的想象，但那些尚未怀疑加入一个极其昂贵的“想象的共同体”的效用的能干人士很快就会怀疑。事实上，民族国家的拥护者已经开始抱怨认知精英的日益疏离。已故的克里斯托弗·拉什在他的长篇大论《精英的反叛和对民主的背叛》中抨击了那些“生计不是依靠财产所有权而是依靠操纵信息”的人。74^拉什哀叹新兴信息经济的超国家性。他写道：

Notwithstanding the firm grip the nation-state as the “in-group” has had on the modern imagination, able people who do not already doubt the utility of affiliating with a grossly expensive “imagined community” soon will. Indeed, the partisans of the nation-state have already begun to complain of the growing detachment of the cognitive elites. The late Christopher Lasch, in his diatribe The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy, assails those “whose livelihoods rest not so much on the ownership of property as on the manipulation of information.”⁷⁴ Lasch laments the extranational character of the emerging information economy. He writes:

新精英们所经营的市场如今已是国际化的。他们的命运与跨国界的企业息息相关。他们更关心的是整个体系的平稳运转，而不是体系的任何一个部分。他们的忠诚——如果这个词本身在这个语境中没有过时的话——是国际性的，而不是地区性的、国家的或地方性的。他们与布鲁塞尔或香港的同行有更多的共同点，而不是与尚未接入全球通信网络的广大美国人民的共同点^。75

the markets in which the new elites operate is now international in scope. Their fortunes are tied to enterprises that operate across national boundaries. They are more concerned with the smooth functioning of the system as a whole than with any of its parts. Their loyalties—if the term is not itself anachronistic in this context—are international rather than regional, national or local. They have more in common with their counterparts in Brussels or Hong Kong than with the masses of Americans not yet plugged into the network of global communications.⁷⁵

尽管拉什远非一个冷静的观察者，而且他显然有意将信息精英描绘得不那么讨人喜欢，但他对那些从地方暴政中解放出来的人的蔑视，是基于对本书关注的某些相同发展的看法。当我们阅读拉什的批评，或者米基·考斯（《平等的终结》）、迈克尔·沃尔泽（《正义的领域》）或罗伯特·赖希（《国家的运作》）的批评，我们会看到，我们的分析部分内容得到了那些对市场深化的许多后果深表同情的作者的证实，尽管这些作者往往不高兴，更不用说对主权个人的非国有化了。拉什严厉批评那些有超越国家野心的人“觊觎新贵族的头脑”，因为他们“在快速流动的金钱、魅力、时尚和流行文化中与国际市场建立联系”。他继续说道：

Although Lasch was far from a dispassionate observer, and he obviously meant his portrait of the information elite to be unflattering, his contempt for those who are liberated from the tyranny of place rests on a perception of some of the same developments that are the focus of this book. When we read Lasch’s critiques or those of Mickey Kaus (The End of Equality), Michael Walzer (Spheres of Justice), or Robert Reich (The Work of Nations), we see parts of our analysis confirmed, often unhappily, by authors who are deeply unsympathetic to many of the consequences of the deepening of markets, much less the denationalization of Sovereign Individuals. Lasch lambastes those with extranational ambitions “who covet membership in the new aristocracy of brains” for “cultivating ties with the international market in fast-moving money, glamour, fashion and popular culture.” He continues:

问题是他们是否认为自己是美国人。爱国主义在他们的美德等级中当然排不上很高的位置。另一方面，“多元文化主义”却非常适合他们，让人联想到全球集市的美好形象，在那里，异国风味的美食、异国风格的服装、异国音乐、异国部落习俗可以不受任何限制地品尝，无需提出任何问题，也无需做出任何承诺。新精英们只有在过境时才会感到宾至如归，在前往高层会议、新特许经营店盛大开业、国际电影节或未被发现的度假胜地的途中。他们本质上是游客的世界观——这种观点不太可能鼓励对民主的热情奉献^。76

It is a question whether they think of themselves as Americans at all. Patriotism, certainly, does not rank very high in their hierarchy of virtues. “Multiculturalism,” on the other hand, suits them to perfection, conjuring up the agreeable image of a global bazaar in which exotic cuisines, exotic styles of dress, exotic music, exotic tribal customs can be savored indiscriminately, with no questions asked and no commitments required. The new elites are at home only in transit, en route to a high-level conference, to the grand opening of a new franchise, to an international film festival or an undiscovered resort. Theirs is essentially a tourist’s view of the world—not a perspective likely to encourage a passionate devotion to democracy.⁷⁶

经济民族主义

Economic Nationalism

在对构成信息时代虚拟社区的“过客”的批评背后，隐藏着这样一种认识：对于许多精英来说，过客的好处已经超过了他们的成本。像拉什和沃尔泽这样的批评家并不否认，清醒的成本效益分析使高技能人士失去公民身份。他们并不认为，那些他们鄙视其态度的信息精英误判了他们的最大利益所在。他们也不假装复利表真的表明，继续将自己的钱投入国家社会保障计划（更不用说所得税）比私人投资产生更好的回报。相反，他们懂算术。他们已经看到了显而易见的结论。但他们不承认经济理性的颠覆性逻辑，而是对其退缩，认为信息精英超越地方暴政并抛弃“未开化者”是一种“背叛” ^。77

Lurking behind criticisms of the “transients” who make up the virtual communities of the Information Age is a recognition that for many in the elite the benefits of transience already exceed their costs. Critics like Lasch and Walzer do not dispute that clearheaded cost-benefit analysis makes citizenship obsolete for persons of high skills. They do not propose that those among the information elite whose attitudes they despise have miscalculated where their best interests lie. Nor do they pretend that the compound-interest tables really show that continuing to pump one’s money into a national social security program, much less income taxes, produces a better return than private investment. To the contrary, they understand arithmetic. They have seen the sums to their obvious conclusions. But rather than acknowledge the subversive logic of economic rationality, they recoil from it, counting it as “betrayal” for the information elite to transcend the tyranny of place and abandon “the unenlightened.”⁷⁷

和帕特·布坎南一样，社会民主党人也是经济民族主义者，他们憎恨市场战胜政治。他们谴责“新贵族头脑”脱离了地方，不关心他们关于大众最大利益所在的看法。虽然他们没有明确承认个人的非国有化，但他们抨击其早期的暗示和表现，沃尔泽将其描述为“市场帝国主义”，或金钱“渗透过边界”以购买拉什所阐述的“不应该出售”的东西的趋势，例如免除兵役。78 请^注意，反动派将民族国家的军事要求视为金钱和市场不应侵犯的神圣领域。

Like Pat Buchanan, the social democrats are economic nationalists who resent the triumph of markets over politics. They denounce “the new aristocracy of brains” for being detached from place and not caring passionately about their view of where the best interests of the masses lie. While they do not explicitly recognize the denationalization of the individual as such, they rail against its early hints and manifestations, what Walzer describes as “the imperialism of the market,” or the tendency of money to “seep across boundaries” in order to buy things which, as Lasch elaborates, “should not be for sale,” such as exemption from military service.⁷⁸ Note the reactionary harking to the military demands of the nation-state as a sacred ground upon which money and markets should not trespass.

这些对信息精英的批评预示着下个世纪民众对主权个人崛起的反应。随着新的、更受市场驱动的保护形式的出现，大量有能力的人将越来越清楚地认识到，大多数所谓的国籍好处都是虚构的。这不仅将导致更好地核算公民身份的机会成本，还将创造新的方式来构建所谓的“政治”甚至“经济”问题。引用弗雷德里克·C·莱恩对一个古老困境的表述，这是第一次，“一个为自己而行动的个体企业家”能够通过在司法管辖区之间移动来改变自己的保护成本，而不必等待它们受到“集体决策和集体行动”的影响^。79

These criticisms of the information elite anticipate the terms of a popular reaction against the rise of Sovereign Individuals in the next millennium. As new, more market-driven forms of protection become available, it will become increasingly evident to the large numbers of able persons that most of the supposed benefits of nationality are imaginary. This will lead not only to better accounting of the opportunity costs of citizenship, it will also create new ways of framing allegedly “political” and even “economic” questions. For the first time, “an individual entrepreneur acting for and by himself” will be able to vary his own protection costs by moving between jurisdictions, without waiting for them to be effected by “group decision and group action,” to quote Frederic C. Lane’s formulation of an old dilemma.⁷⁹

随着保护的代价“受制于替代原则”，这将暴露出强制的算术，加剧信息时代新世界主义精英与“信息贫民”之间的冲突。“信息贫民”是人口的剩余部分，他们大多只说一种语言，不擅长解决问题，也不具备一些全球市场所需的技能。这些“失败者”或“落后者”，正如托马斯·弗里德曼所描述的那样，无疑将继续将他们的福祉与现有民族国家的政治生活联系起来^。80

As the price paid for protection becomes subject “to the principle of substitution,” this will lay bare the arithmetic of compulsion, intensifying conflict between the new cosmopolitan elite of the Information Age and “the information poor,” the remainder of the population who are largely monoglot and do not excel in problem-solving or possess some globally marketable skill. These “losers” or “left-behinds,” as Thomas L. Friedman describes them, will no doubt continue to identify their well-being with the political life of existing nation-states.⁸⁰

大多数政治议程将是反动的​​​​​

MOST POLITICAL AGENDAS WILL BE REACTIONARY

21 世纪伊始，大多数怀有强烈政治议程的人，无论是民族主义者、环保主义者还是社会主义者，都会团结起来捍卫摇摇欲坠的民族国家。随着时间的推移，民族国家的生存和民族主义情感是维护政治强制领域的先决条件，这一点将变得越来越明显。正如比利格指出的那样，民族主义“是传统（政治）战略的条件，无论具体的政治是什么。” ⁸¹因此，未来几年，所有政治纲领中的民族主义内容都将像贪吃者的肚子一样膨胀。例如，环保主义者将更少关注保护“地球母亲”，而更多地关注保护“祖国”。出于我们稍后将探讨的原因，国家和公民身份对那些高度重视平等的人来说尤其神圣。他们将会比现在理解的更多，同意克里斯托弗·拉什的观点，他追随汉娜·阿伦特的脚步，宣称“是公民身份赋予了平等，而不是平等创造了公民权。” ⁸²

Most of those who harbor an ardent political agenda, whether nationalist, environmentalist, or socialist, will rally to defend the wobbling nation-state as the twenty-first century opens. Over time, it will become ever more obvious that survival of the nation-state and the nationalist sensibility are preconditions for preserving a realm for political compulsion. As Billig points out, nationalism “is the condition for conventional (political) strategies, whatever the particular politics.”⁸¹ Therefore, the nationalist content in all political programs will swell like a glutton’s paunch in the years ahead. Environmentalists, for example, will focus less on protecting “Mother Earth” and more on protecting the “motherland.” For reasons we explore later, the nation and citizenship will be especially sacred to those who value equality highly. More than they may now understand, they will come to agree with Christopher Lasch, who followed Hannah Arendt in proclaiming, “It is citizenship that confers equality, not equality that creates a right to citizenship.”⁸²

主权私有化将切断财富创造者与国家和地方的联系，从而削弱工业时代对平等的重视。公民身份将不再是一种在有限领土内基于投票平等进行收入再分配的机制。其后果将包括对进步历史观的又一次打击。与二十世纪初所谓有远见的人的期望相反，自由市场并没有被几十年摧毁，而是取得了胜利。马克思主义者预测资本主义的衰落（这从未发生过）将导致民族国家的超越和工人阶级普遍阶级意识的出现。事实上，国家将会衰落，但方式却截然不同。与他们的预期截然相反的事情正在发生。资本主义的胜利将导致资本家出现一种新的全球或超国家意识，其中许多人将成为主权个人。马克思主义者认为，最有能力、最富有的人并非依靠国家来约束工人，而是民族国家行为的净输家。显然，随着市场战胜强制，他们超越民族主义，获益最多的是他们。

The privatization of sovereignty will deflate the industrial-era premium on equality by severing ties of the creators of wealth to nation and place. Citizenship will no longer serve as a mechanism for enforcing income redistribution based upon the equality of the vote within a confined territory. The consequences will include another bruising for the progressive view of history. Contrary to the expectations of supposedly forward-thinking people when the twentieth century opened, the free market was not destroyed by the decades but left triumphant. The Marxists anticipated the eclipse of capitalism, which never happened, to lead to the transcendence of nation-states and the emergence of a universal class consciousness among workers. In fact, the state will be eclipsed, but in a very different way. Something more nearly the opposite to their expectation is happening. The triumph of capitalism will lead to the emergence of a new global, or extranational, consciousness among the capitalists, many of whom will become Sovereign Individuals. Far from depending upon the state to discipline the workers, as the Marxists imagined, the ablest, wealthiest persons were net losers from the actions of the nation-state. It is clearly they who have the most to gain by transcending nationalism as markets triumph over compulsion.

也许不会立即发生，但很快，肯定在一代人的时间内，几乎每个信息精英都会选择在低税或免税管辖区开展收入活动。随着信息时代改变全球，它将在复利方面留下一个明确的实例教训。几年内，更不用说几十年内，人们将普遍认识到，几乎任何有才华的人都可以通过放弃高税收的民族国家积累更高的净资产并享受更好的生活。我们已经暗示过主要民族国家施加的惊人成本，但由于这是一个鲜为人知的问题的症结，因此值得再次强调国籍的机会成本。

Perhaps not immediately, but soon, certainly within the span of a generation, almost everyone among the information elite will elect to domicile his income-earning activities in low-tax or no-tax jurisdictions. As the Information Age transforms the globe, it will impress an unmistakable object lesson in compound interest. Within years, let alone decades, it will be widely understood that almost anyone of talent could accumulate a much higher net worth and enjoy a better life by abandoning high-tax nation-states. We have already hinted at the staggering costs that the leading nation-states impose, but as this is the crux of an issue that is little understood, it is worth reemphasizing the opportunity costs of nationality.

机会成本

Opportunity Costs

信息精英们不仅不会因目前高额税收资助的政府服务的减少或减少而遭受损失，反而会以前所未有的方式蓬勃发展。只要逃避目前支付的超额税收负担，他们就能获得巨大的利润来改善家庭的物质生活。如前所述，如果你每年能从投资中获得 10% 的收益，那么每年每缴纳 5,000 美元的税款就会使你的一生净资产减少 240 万美元。但如果你能获得 20% 的收益，那么每年每缴纳 5,000 美元的税款就会使你的财富减少 4,400 万美元在四十年的时间里。累计起来，每年支付 5,000 美元将花费您每年超过一百万美元。按照这个速度，每年 25 万美元的税款很快就会转化为每年超过 5,000 万美元的损失，或一生中 22 亿美元的损失。当然，偶尔收入较高，即使是几年，特别是在生命早期，也意味着掠夺性税收带来的财富损失更加惊人。

Far from suffering from the loss or curtailment of government services currently financed by high taxes, the information elite will flourish in an unparalleled fashion. Simply by escaping the excess tax burden they now pay, they will gain a tremendous margin for improving the material well-being of their families. As previously indicated, each $5,000 in tax paid annually reduces your lifetime net worth by $2.4 million if you can earn 10 percent annually from your investments. But if you could earn 20 percent, each $5,000 in annual tax payments would leave you $44 million poorer over a period of forty years. Cumulatively, paying $5,000 per year would therefore cost you more than a million dollars per year. At that rate, $250,000 per year in tax would soon translate to an annual loss of more than $50 million, or $2.2 billion in a lifetime. And, of course, sporadically higher earnings, for even a few years, especially early in life, imply a still more startling loss of wealth to predatory taxation.

您的作者让我们感到满意的是，超过 20% 的回报是可能的。在我们撰写本书的几年里，百慕大 Lines Overseas Management 的同事获得了三位数的回报，平均每年 226%。他们的经验强调了电子表格所表明的内容，即对于许多高收入者和资本所有者来说，掠夺性税收带来的终生成本相当于一大笔财富。

Your authors have seen to our own satisfaction that higher than 20 percent returns are possible. Our colleagues at Lines Overseas Management in Bermuda earned triple-digit returns, averaging 226 percent per annum, during the years when we were writing this book. Their experience underscores what the spreadsheet suggests, that for many high-income earners and owners of capital, predatory taxation imposes a lifetime cost equivalent to a large fortune.

一个收入能力高、按香港税率纳税的人最终可能比一个税前收入相同、按北美或欧洲税率纳税的人拥有多一千倍的财富。让你的资本不断受到高税率管辖区的侵占，就像在赛跑中，每次迈出一步都会有人向你开枪。如果你能在适当的保护下参加同一场赛跑，不受束缚地奔跑，你显然会跑得更远、更快。

An individual with high earnings capacity paying taxes at Hong Kong rates could end up with a thousand times more wealth than someone with the same pretax performance paying taxes at North American or European rates. To subject your capital to recurring invasion by a high-tax jurisdiction is like running in a race and having someone shoot you every time you take a stride. If you could enter the same race with proper protection and run unhobbled, you would obviously go much farther, more quickly.

未来的主权个人将利用克里斯托弗·拉什和其他信息精英批评者所不齿的“短暂”倾向，他们将物色利润最高的司法管辖区作为定居地。虽然这违背了民族主义的逻辑，但却符合令人信服的经济逻辑。10% 的利润差异，更不用说 10 倍的利润差异，经常会促使追求利润最大化的个人改变他们的生活方式和生产技术，以及居住地。西方文明的历史就是一部不断变化历史，在曲折的超级政治条件的刺激下，人们和繁荣不断迁移到新的机遇领域。利润回报的一千倍差异将与有史以来促使理性人行动起来的最强大刺激相媲美。或者换句话说，大多数人，尤其是托马斯·弗里德曼所说的“失败者和被遗弃者”，如果有机会，会很乐意为了 5000 万美元而离开任何民族国家，更不用说民族国家从最富有的 1% 纳税人身上征收的更大成本。因此，主权个人购买管辖权的兴起是人们可以做出的最准确的预测之一。

The Sovereign Individuals of the future will take advantage of the “transient” inclinations that so offend Christopher Lasch and other critics of the information elite, and they will shop for the most profitable jurisdictions in which to domicile. While this is contrary to the logic of nationalism, it accords with a compelling economic logic. A 10 percent, let alone a tenfold, bottom-line difference will frequently motivate profit-maximizing individuals to alter their lifestyles and production techniques, as well as their place of abode. The history of Western civilization is a record of restless change in which people and prosperity have repeatedly migrated to new areas of opportunity under the spur of meandering megapolitical conditions. A thousandfold difference in bottom-line returns would match the most potent stimulus that has ever put rational people in motion. Or put another way, most people, particularly those Thomas L. Friedman calls the “losers and left-behinds,” if given a chance, would gladly leave any nation-state for $50 million, not to mention the still greater costs that nation-states impose in tax extracted from the top 1 percent of taxpayers. The rise of Sovereign Individuals shopping for jurisdictions is therefore one of the surest forecasts one can make.

主权商业化​​​

THE COMMERCIALIZATION OF SOVEREIGNTY

从成本效益的角度来看，在二十世纪即将结束时，公民身份已经是一笔可怕的交易。这一点被一种无意识的有趣的议会研究报告，题为“女王是澳大利亚公民吗？”，由澳大利亚议会研究服务处的 Ian Ireland 于 1995 年 8 月制作。83 ^Ireland调查了 1948 年的《澳大利亚公民法》，回顾了获得澳大利亚公民身份的四种方式。这些方式与其他主要民族国家的公民身份选择类似，即：

Seen in cost-benefit terms, citizenship was already a dreadful bargain as the twentieth century drew to a close. This was highlighted by an unconsciously funny Parliamentary Research Note entitled “Is the Queen an Australian Citizen?” produced by Ian Ireland of the Australian Parliamentary Research Service in August 1995.⁸³ Ireland canvasses the Australian Citizenship Act of 1948, reviewing the four means by which one can obtain Australian citizenship. These are similar to the options for citizenship in other leading nation-states, namely:

• 出生公民权
• citizenship by birth
• 通过收养获得公民身份
• citizenship by adoption
• 血统公民权
• citizenship by descent
• 授予公民身份
• citizenship by grant

这一切都很平淡无奇，只是它把注意力集中在主权和公民身份的区别上。正如爱尔兰所说，“在传统的法律和政治概念下，君主拥有主权，人民是他的臣民。臣民通过效忠和服从对君主有约束力。”他指出，女王伊丽莎白二世拥有主权这一显而易见的事实，并得出结论：“有一种观点认为，女王不是澳大利亚公民。” ⁸⁴

This is all unremarkable except that it focuses attention upon the distinction between sovereignty and citizenship. As Ireland says, “Under traditional legal and political concepts, the monarch is sovereign and the people are his/ her subjects. Subjects are bound to the monarch by allegiance and subjection.” Noting the obvious fact that Queen Elizabeth II is sovereign, he concludes that “there is an argument that the Queen is not an Australian citizen.”⁸⁴

事实上，她不是。女王，愿她长寿，很幸运她不在乎自己是公民。她是君主，是臣民的君主。和世界上其他少数君主一样，女王生来就是君主，她的地位是现代之前的习俗。君主制的概念由来已久，可以追溯到人类最早的历史记录。那些保留君主制的国家的宪法源于其古代历史，但它仍然有助于决定其社会形态，无论是从阶级声望还是政治权力来看。没有女王的先发优势，后现代个人将不得不发明新的法律原理，以此为基础建立信息技术将赋予他们的事实上的主权。

Indeed, she is not. The Queen, long may she live, is fortunate to be beyond caring about being a citizen. She is sovereign, the Sovereign over her subjects. Like a handful of other monarchs in the world, the Queen is sovereign by birth, having inherited her status as a matter of custom that predates modern times. The idea of monarchy is ancient, going back to the earliest historic records of human life. Those countries that have retained their monarchy owe their constitution to their ancient history, but it still helps to decide the shape of their society, in terms of class prestige if not of political power. Postmodern individuals, without the Queen’s head start, will be obliged to invent new legal rationales upon which to base the de facto sovereignty that information technology will hand them.

主权个人还必须应对嫉妒的腐蚀性后果——这一困难有时会困扰君主，但对于那些传统上不受崇拜但自己发明主权的人来说，这种感受会更加强烈。正如赫尔穆特·舍克在其综合调查《嫉妒》中所写， “如果只有一个国王、一个美国总统——换句话说，只有一个特定地位的成员——他可以相对不受惩罚地过着这样的生活，即使规模小得多，如果大型专业或社会团体中的成功成员也采用这种生活，也会引起同一社会的愤慨。” ⁸⁵作为国家的化身，君主享有一定的嫉妒免疫力，而主权个人则不会受到这种免疫力。

Sovereign Individuals will also have to cope with the corrosive consequences of envy—a difficulty that sometimes detains monarchs, but which will be more intensely felt by persons who are not traditionally venerated but invent their own sovereignty. As Helmut Schoeck wrote in his comprehensive survey, Envy, “Where there is only one king, one president of the United States—in other words, one member only of a particular status—he can live with relative impunity the kind of life which, even on a much smaller scale, would arouse indignation in the same society were it to be adopted by successful members of larger professional or social groups.”⁸⁵ Monarchs, as embodiments of the nation, enjoy a certain immunity to envy that will not carry over to Sovereign Individuals.

信息社会中的“失败者和被遗弃者”肯定会嫉妒和怨恨成功者的成功，尤其是随着市场不断深化这意味着这个世界将越来越成为一个“赢家通吃”的世界。越来越多的人开始将报酬视为相对绩效，而不是像工业生产那样以绝对绩效为基础。工厂工人的工资要么以打卡计的出勤时间为依据，要么以某种产出标准为依据，如生产的件数、组装的单位数或某种类似的衡量标准。86^标准化工资之所以成为可能，是因为使用相同工具的每个人的产出都差不多。但是，概念财富的创造，就像艺术表演一样，在使用相同工具的人之间差别很大。在这方面，整个经济越来越像歌剧，歌声最好的人能获得最高的报酬，而那些唱得走调的人，无论唱得多么认真，通常都不会获得丰厚的报酬。随着许多领域向真正的全球竞争开放，普通表现的回报必然会下降。中等人才将大量涌现，其中一些来自那些可以以领先工业国家普遍存在的费率的一小部分出租时间的人。输家将是那些使用“滑球速度棒”的小联盟外野手，他们的反应速度比击中大联盟的快速球慢半秒。他们不再靠打出本垒打赚取每年 100 万美元，而是只能赚到 2.5 万美元，而且没有明星代言的额外收入。其他人将彻底出局。

The “losers and left-behinds” in the Information Society will surely envy and resent the success of winners, especially as the deepening of markets implies that this will be increasingly a “winners take all” world Increasingly, rewards are already coming to be based upon relative performance, rather than absolute performance as was the case in industrial production. A factory worker was paid either on the basis of hours in attendance as measured by the time clock, or according to some criterion of output, such as pieces made, units assembled or some similar measure.⁸⁶ Standardized pay was made possible by the fact that output was similar for everyone using the same tools. But the creation of conceptual wealth, like artistic performance, varies dramatically among persons using the same tools. In this respect, the whole of the economy is becoming increasingly like opera, where the highest rewards go to those with the best voices, and those who sing out of tune, however earnestly, do not normally attract large rewards. As many fields are opened to truly global competition, the return for ordinary performance is bound to fall. Middle talents will be in vast supply, some originating with persons who can rent their time for a fraction of the rates that prevail in the leading industrial countries. The losers will be the minor-league outfielders with “slider speed bats” whose reflexes are half a second shy of hitting a major league fastball. Instead of making a million dollars a year banging out home runs, they will make $25,000, with no supplementary income from celebrity endorsements. Others will strike out altogether.

“一旦一个国家向全球市场开放……，那些有能力利用这一机会的公民将成为赢家，而那些没有能力的人将成为输家或被抛在后面……通常有一个政党……声称能够对抗全球化或减轻全球化的痛苦。那就是美国的帕特·布坎南、俄罗斯的共产党，以及现在土耳其的伊斯兰福利党……所以土耳其发生的事情远比原教旨主义的接管要复杂得多。当不断扩大的全球化产生越来越多的输家时，当不断扩大的民主化让他们都拥有了投票权时，就会发生这种情况，而宗教政党则有效地利用这种巧合来夺取政权。” ⁸⁷

—托马斯·弗里德曼

“Once a country opens itself up to the global market…, those of its citizens with the skills to take advantage of it become the winners, and those without become losers or left-behinds.…[U]sually one party… claims to be able to defy globalization or ease its pain. That is Pat Buchanan in America, the Communists in Russia and now the Islamic Welfare Party here in Turkey.… So what is happening in Turkey is much more complicated than just a fundamentalist takeover. It is what happens when widening globalization spins off more and more losers, when widening democratization gives them all a vote, while religious parties effectively exploit this coincidence to take power.”⁸⁷

—THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

信息时代的输家是谁？一般来说，税收消费者将是输家。他们通常是那些无法通过迁往其他司法管辖区来增加财富的人。他们的大部分收入都属于国家政治管辖区的规则，而不是由市场估值来传达。因此，取消或大幅削减对他们的净资产产生负面影响的税收似乎不会让他们的生活变得更好——降低税收的代价是收入流的减少转移支付。他们将失去收入，因为他们将不再能够依靠政治强制来从比他们更有生产力的人的口袋里掏钱。那些没有储蓄、依靠政府支付退休金和医疗费用的人很可能生活水平下降。这种收入损失意味着金融作家斯科特·伯恩斯所称的“超验”或政治资本的贬值。88^这种“超验”或虚拟资本不是基于资产的经济所有权，而是基于政治规则和条例所确定的收入流的实际权利。例如，政府转移计划的预期收入可以转换为按现行利率资本化的债券。这种由想象的共同体资助的虚拟债券是超验资本。它将因“大转型”而突然贬值，而“大转型”注定会减少政治当局对兑现承诺所需现金流的控制。

Who will the losers be in the Information Age? In general terms, the tax consumers will be losers. It is usually they who could not increase their wealth by moving to another jurisdiction. Much of their income is lodged in the rules of a national political jurisdiction rather than conveyed by market valuations. Therefore, eliminating or sharply reducing the taxes that are negatively compounding against their net worths may not appear to make them much better off—the price of lower taxation is a diminished stream of transfer payments. They will lose income because they will no longer be able to depend upon political compulsion to pick the pockets of persons more productive than themselves. Those without savings who rely upon government to pay their retirement benefits and medical care will in all probability suffer a fall in living standards. This loss of income translates into a depreciation of what financial writer Scott Burns has dubbed “transcendental” or political capital.⁸⁸ This “transcendental” or imaginary capital is based not upon the economic ownership of assets but upon the de facto claim to the income stream established by political rules and regulations. For example, the expected income from government transfer programs could be converted into a bond capitalized at prevailing interest rates. This imaginary bond funded by the imagined community is transcendental capital. It will be suddenly depreciated by the “great transformation” that is destined to reduce the grip of political authorities upon the cash flow required to redeem their promises.

“在边境和公海上，没有人可以长期垄断使用暴力，商人可以避免支付高额的勒索，因为这样可以通过其他更便宜的方式获得保护。” ⁸⁹

—弗雷德里克·C·莱恩

“On frontiers and on the high seas, where no one had an enduring monopoly in the use of violence, merchants avoided payment of exactions which were so high that protection could be obtained more cheaply by other means.”⁸⁹

—FREDERIC C. LANE

不难想象，信息精英很可能会利用新网络经济提供的解放和个人主权的机会。同样，随着信息技术在新千年的影响不断扩大，可以预见，“落后者”将变得越来越沙文主义和令人不快。很难猜测反应会在什么时候变得丑陋。我们的猜测是，当西方国家开始像前苏联那样毫不含糊地分裂时，相互指责将会加剧。

It does not take a giant stretch of the imagination to see that the information elite are likely to take advantage of the opportunities for liberation and personal sovereignty offered by the new cybereconomy. Equally, it is to be expected that the “left-behinds” will become increasingly jingoistic and unpleasant as the impact of information technology grows in the new millennium. It is difficult to guess at precisely what point the reaction will turn ugly. Our guess is that the recriminations will intensify when Western nations begin to unambiguously crack apart in the manner of the former Soviet Union.

同样，每当一个民族国家崩溃时，它都会促进进一步的权力下放，并鼓励主权个人的自治。我们预计，随着大量类似于城邦的飞地和司法管辖区从国家废墟中崛起，主权实体的数量将大幅增加。这些新实体中将包括许多提供极具竞争力的保护服务定价、对收入和资本征收低税或不征税的实体。这些新实体几乎注定会比领先的经合组织民族国家更有吸引力的定价其保护服务。简单地从市场细分的角度来看，市场中被保护的领域效率低下、成本低廉的服务是最不理想的。任何希望以高额税收换取复杂的国家支出的人都有充足的机会这样做。因此，对于新的微型主权来说，最有利和最有利的战略几乎必然是高效率、低价格的替代方案。这样的微型主权很难期望提供比幸存的民族国家提供的更完整的服务。由于所有民族国家肯定不会立即崩溃，国家主义替代方案很可能得到充分供应，特别是在过渡初期。另一方面，可以相对便宜地提供简单、可容忍的法律和秩序。如果社会动荡和犯罪在旧核心工业国家蔓延到我们预期的程度，那么在一个管辖区内，可容忍的法律和秩序将比国家太空计划、国家资助的妇女博物馆或为下岗高管提供的补贴再培训计划更有吸引力。

Equally, every time a nation-state cracks up, it will facilitate further devolution and encourage the autonomy of Sovereign Individuals. We expect to see a significant multiplication of sovereign entities, as scores of enclaves and jurisdictions more akin to city-states emerge from the rubble of nations. These new entities will include many that will offer highly competitive pricing of protection services, imposing low taxes or none at all on income and capital. The new entities are almost bound to price their protection services more attractively than do the leading OECD nation-states. Seen simply as a matter of market segmentation, the area of the market that is most poorly served is the high-efficiency, low-cost end. Anyone who wishes to pay high taxes in exchange for a complicated array of state spending has ample opportunity to do so. Therefore, the most advantageous and profitable strategy for a new minisovereignty is almost bound to lie with a high-efficiency, low-price alternative. Such a minisovereignty could only with great difficulty expect to provide a more complete array of services than those on offer from the surviving nation-states. Since all nation-states will certainly not collapse at once, the statist alternative is likely to be well supplied, especially early in the transition. On the other hand, a no-frills regime of tolerable law and order can be provided relatively cheaply. If social unrest and crime spread in the old core industrial countries to the degree that we expect, tolerable law and order will be far more appealing in a jurisdiction than a national space program, a state-sponsored women’s museum, or subsidized retraining schemes for displaced executives.

个人的非国有化​​

THE DENATIONALIZATION OF THE INDIVIDUAL

随着新机构的出现，公民身份将变得不那么有吸引力，也更难以维持，这些机构为政府目前所投入的服务提供了便利，首先是保护。这将使个人不再以国家身份来认同自己成为现实。然而，公民身份的去神秘化将是一个缓慢的过程。在日常生活中，你不断接触到一连串陈词滥调的信息，这些信息旨在强化你对当地民族国家的认同。这些信息使你不太可能忘记“你的国籍”。对许多人来说，国籍是身份的重要标志。“我们”被教导要用国籍来看待世界。这是“我们的”国家，“我们的”运动员参加奥运会。当他们获胜时，在仪式上飘扬的就是“我们的”国旗。在颁奖典礼上，“我们的”国歌让评委和其他参赛者立正。“我们”被引导相信这是“我们的”胜利，尽管除了作为公民在同一领土内之外，我们从未明确“我们”是如何参与其中的。

Citizenship will become less attractive and tenable as new institutions emerge to facilitate choice in the services governments now engross, be-gining with protection. This will make it practical for individuals to cease to identify themselves in national terms. Yet the demystification of citizenship will be a slow process. You are constantly exposed to a barrage of banal messages in the routines of daily life designed to reinforce your identification with your local nation-state. These messages make it highly unlikely for you to forget “your nationality.” For many people, nationality is a crucial badge of identity. “We” are taught to see the world in terms of nationality. It is “our” country, “our” athletes compete in the Olympics. When they win, it is “our” flag that waves in the ceremony. “Our” anthem brings the judges and other competitors to attention in the awards ceremony. “We” are led to believe that it is “our” victory, although it is never quite clear how “we” participated, other than by being within the same territory as a citizen.

从第一人称复数到单数

From First Person Plural to Singular

随着信息技术的兴起，它将有助于促进 MTV 观众态度中已经体现出来的全球视野，并为主权个人创造利用信息技术的潜在可能性以摆脱国家主义税收负担的​​方法。例如，在未来几十年内，窄带广播将取代广域广播，成为个人获取新闻的方式。这已经意义重大。这相当于数百万人的想象力从第一人称复数变为单数。当个人开始充当自己的新闻编辑，选择感兴趣的话题和新闻报道时，他们选择向自己灌输为民族国家牺牲的紧迫性的可能性就小得多。事实上，他们的态度更有可能受到他们作为消费者所接触的全球文化的影响，而不是他们可能订阅的高度个人化的“新闻”小众节目。教育私有化也会产生同样的效果，而技术也推动了这一进程。在中世纪，教育牢牢地控制在教会手中。在现代，教育一直处于国家的控制之下。用埃里克·霍布斯鲍姆的话来说，“国家教育把人们变成了一个特定国家的公民：‘农民变成了法国人’。” ⁹⁰在信息时代，教育将被私有化和个性化。它将不再背负工业化时期教育所特有的沉重政治包袱，民族主义也不会被不断灌输到思想生活的每个角落。

As information technology comes to the fore, it will help facilitate the global perspective already evident in the attitudes of MTV viewers, as well as create ways by which Sovereign Individuals can harness the latent possibilities of information technology to escape from the nationalist burden of taxation. Within the next few decades, for example, narrow-casting will replace broadcasting as the method by which individuals obtain their news. This has significant implications. It amounts to a change in the imaginations of millions from first personal plural to singular. As individuals themselves begin to serve as their own news editors, selecting what topics and news stories are of interest, it is far less likely that they will choose to indoctrinate themselves in the urgencies of sacrifice for the nation-state. Indeed, their attitudes are more likely to be informed by the global culture to which they relate as consumers, of entertainment than by the highly personal “news” narrow-casts to which they may subscribe. Much the same effect will arise from the privatization of education, again facilitated by technology. In the medieval period, education was firmly under the control of the Church. In the modern age, education has been under the control of the state. In the words of Eric Hobsbawm, “state education transformed people into citizens of a specific country: ‘peasants into Frenchmen.’ ”⁹⁰ In the Information Age, education will be privatized and individualized. It will no longer be lumbered with the heavy political baggage that characterized education during the industrial period. Nationalism will not be constantly massaged into every corner of the mind’s life.

互联网和万维网的出现也将降低位置在商业中的重要性。它将创建不受地域限制的个人地址。基于卫星的数字电话服务将超越共享通用国际拨号代码的基于位置的陆地线路系统。个人将拥有自己独特的全球电话地址，就像互联网地址一样，无论他身在何处，都可以联系到他。适时，国家邮政垄断将会瓦解，允许全球服务机构进行私有化邮件投递，而与任何现有民族国家没有任何特殊联系。

The move to the Internet and the World Wide Web will also reduce the importance of location in commerce. It will create individual addresses that are not bounded territorially. Satellite-based digital telephone services will evolve beyond location-based land-line systems sharing a common international dialing code. The individual will have his own, unique global telephone address, like an Internet address, that will reach him wherever he happens to be. In due course, national postal monopolies will collapse, allowing privatized mail delivery by worldwide services with no particular ties to any existing nation-state.

这些以及其他看似微小的举措将有助于将普通消费者以及认知精英从对民族国家的机械认同中解放出来。公民身份的去神秘化将最显著地加速，因为出现了一些实用的替代方案，不再局限于国家垄断的有界领土内的交易。网络经济的基石——网络货币、网络银行和不受监管的全球网络证券市场——几乎注定会大规模出现。随着这些措施的出现，贪婪的政府没收“公民”财富的能力将逐渐减弱。

These and other apparently small steps will help free the ordinary consumer, as well as the cognitive elite, from rote identification with the nation-state. The demystification of citizenship will be most dramatically accelerated by the emergence of practical alternatives to dealing within bounded territories monopolized by states. The building blocks of the cybereconomy—cybermoney, cyberbanking, and an unregulated global cybermarket in securities—are almost bound to come into existence on a large scale. As they do, the capacity of greedy governments to confiscate the wealth of “citizens” will shrivel.

虽然主要国家无疑会试图通过合作限制加密并防止公民逃离其领域来执行卡特尔以维持高税收和法定货币，但国家最终会失败。地球上最有生产力的人将找到通往经济自由的道路。国家甚至不太可能有效地将人们关在可以勒索赎金的地方。禁止非法移民的努力无效，令人信服地表明民族国家无法封锁边境，阻止成功人士逃走。富人逃走的积极性至少不亚于出租车司机和服务员进城的积极性。

While the leading states will no doubt attempt to enforce a cartel to preserve high taxes and fiat money by cooperating to limit encryption and prevent citizens from escaping their domains, the states will ultimately fail. The most productive people on the planet will find their way to economic freedom. It is unlikely that the state will even be effective at keeping people penned up where they can be physically held to ransom. The ineffectiveness of efforts to bar illegal immigrants convincingly shows that nation-states will be unable to seal their borders to prevent successful people from escaping. The rich will be at least as enterprising in getting out as would-be taxi drivers and waiters are at getting in.

自中世纪主权分裂以来，边界首次不再清晰。正如我们之前所探讨的，未来许多金融交易将不再在某个特定区域进行。越来越多的主权个人将利用这种模糊性放弃纳税义务，超越公民身份成为客户，而不是接受基于出生偶然性的债务继承。他们将以客户的身份协商私人税收协定，就像第 8 章所分析的瑞士现行的税收协定一样。与瑞士法语区各州协商的典型私人税收协定允许个人或家庭以每年 50,000 瑞士法郎（目前约为 45,000 美元）的固定税款换取居住权。请注意，这不是统一税率，而是与收入无关的固定税额。如果您的年收入为 50,000 瑞士法郎（45,000 美元），您就不应该签订这样的私人税收协定，因为您的税率将为 100%。如果您的收入为 500,000 瑞士法郎，您的税率为 10%。如果您的收入为 5,000,000 瑞士法郎，税率仅为 1%。如果您的收入为 5000 万瑞士法郎，您的税率仅为 1% 的十分之一。如果与纽约市 58% 的边际税率相比，这似乎是一笔非常划算的交易，那么这只是衡量工业化时期政府服务定价普遍变得多么掠夺性和垄断性的一个指标。

For the first time since the medieval period of fragmented sovereignty, borders will not be clearly demarcated. As we explored earlier, there will be no distinct territory in which many future financial transactions will occur. Instead of accepting an inheritance of liabilities on the basis of an accident of birth, increasing numbers of Sovereign Individuals will take advantage of this ambiguity to desert their tax liabilities, moving beyond citizenship to become customers. They will negotiate private tax treaties as customers, along the lines now available in Switzerland, as analyzed in Chapter 8. A typical private tax treaty negotiated with the French-speaking Swiss cantons allows an individual or family to reside in exchange for a fixed annual tax payment of 50,000 Swiss francs (currently about $45,000). Note that this is not a flat-rate tax, but a flat amount of tax fixed without respect to income. If your annual income is 50,000 Swiss francs ($45,000), you should not enter into such a private tax treaty because your tax rate would be 100 percent. At an income of 500,000 Swiss francs, your rate is 10 percent. At SF5,000,000, the rate is just 1 percent. At SF50 million, your tax rate is just 1/10th of 1 percent. If this seems an incredibly good deal compared to a marginal rate of 58 percent in New York City, that is merely a measure of how predatory and monopolistic the pricing of government services generally became during the industrial period.

事实上，每年支付 50,000 瑞士法郎对于政府提供的必要和有用的服务来说已经足够了。瑞士人肯定会从为每一位迁入的百万富翁提供服务并每年向他们支付 50,000 瑞士法郎的特权中获得巨额利润。在许多情况下，政府让另一位百万富翁居住在管辖范围内的边际成本几乎为零。因此，政府每年从这笔交易中获得的利润将接近 50,000 瑞士法郎。任何可以降低价格并仍能让低成本提供商获得大约 100% 利润的服务都是垄断的，而且价格过高到了极点。值得注意的不是在这种特殊情况下征收的税率应该按收入的百分比下降，而是在 20 世纪，不同的人为政府服务支付的金额应该相差悬殊，这似乎从未显得“公平”。这尤其奇怪，因为使用政府服务最多的人支付最少，而使用最少的人支付最多。所有这些国家都将为任何高收入的美国人提供比美国更优越的居住地，一生中价值数千万美元。除非美国税收改革，使其与其他司法管辖区的税收更具竞争力，并且不再以国籍为基础征税，否则有思想的人将放弃美国国籍，尽管克林顿的离境税设置了障碍，但还是会选择负担较少的护照。

In fact, 50,000 Swiss francs is an ample annual payment for the necessary and useful services of government. The Swiss surely make a large profit from serving every millionaire who moves in and pays them 50,000 Swiss francs annually for the privilege. In many cases, the government’s marginal cost to have another millionaire living in the jurisdiction is approximately zero. Therefore, its annual profit on the transaction will approach 50,000 Swiss francs. Any service that can be undercut and still allow the low-cost provider approximately a 100 percent profit is monopolized and overpriced to an extreme. What is remarkable is not that the rate of tax charged should fall as a percentage of income in this particular case, but that it should ever have seemed “fair” that different persons should pay wildly different amounts for the services of government during the twentieth century. This is particularly odd in that those who use government services the most pay the least, and those who use them least pay the most. All of them will provide an advantage as a domicile over the United States worth tens of millions over a lifetime to any high-income American. Unless U.S. taxes are reformed to become more competitive with those of other jurisdictions, and are no longer levied on the basis of nationality, thinking persons will renounce U.S. citizenship, notwithstanding the obstacles imposed by Clinton’s exit tax, to take up passports that entail less onerous liabilities.

工业时代的政府根据纳税人的成功来定价，而不是根据所提供服务的成本或价值。政府服务的商业化定价将带来更令人满意的保护，价格远低于传统民族国家所规定的价格。

Governments in the industrial era priced their services on the basis of the success of the taxpayer, rather than in relation to the costs or value of any services provided. The movement to commercial pricing of government service will lead to more satisfactory protection at a far lower price than that imposed by conventional nation-states.

公民道德与骑士精神并存

Citizenship Goes the Way of Chivalry

简而言之，公民身份注定要走骑士精神的道路。随着提供保护的基础再次重组，补充该体系的合理化和激励意识形态也将不可避免地发生变化。半个世纪前，在中世纪末期，当以个人服务换取保护通常不再是一种有偿提议时，人们以可预见的方式做出了反应。他们放弃了骑士精神。宣誓和个人忠诚不再像前五个世纪那样受到重视。现在，信息技术有望同样颠覆公民身份。民族国家和民族主义的主张将被揭开神秘面纱，就像五个世纪前垄断教会的主张被揭开神秘面纱一样。

In short, citizenship is destined to go the way of chivalry. As the basis upon which protection is provided is reorganized once again, the rationalizations and motivating ideologies that complement the system will also inevitably change. Half a millennium ago, at the close of the Middle Ages, when the provision of protection in return for personal service generally ceased to be a paying proposition, people responded in the predictable way. They abandoned chivalry. Sworn oaths and personal fealty ceased to be taken as seriously as they had been for the previous five centuries. Now information technology promises to be equally subversive of citizenship. The nation-state and the claims of nationalism will be demystified just as the claims of the monopoly Church were demystified five centuries ago.

虽然反动派会试图诋毁创新者并重振民族主义情绪，但我们怀疑，在超级政治中不复存在的民族国家能否发挥足够强大的忠诚度来抵御信息技术带来的竞争压力。在一个政府破产的世界里，大多数有思想的人都宁愿作为保护服务的客户受到良好的待遇，而不是作为民族国家的公民受到掠夺。

While reactionaries will respond by attempting to vilify innovators and revive nationalist sentiment, we doubt that the megapolitically defunct nation-state can exert a sufficiently strong tug of loyalties to withstand the competitive pressures unleashed by information technology. Most thinking individuals in a world of bankrupt governments will prefer to be well treated as customers of protection services, rather than be plundered as citizens of nation-states.

富裕的 OECD 国家对在其境内经商的个人征收沉重的税收和监管负担。当 OECD 民族国家是唯一可以经商和居住且生活舒适度合理的司法管辖区时，这些成本可能还是可以忍受的。但那一天已经过去了。作为最富裕民族国家的居民，为纳税和监管所付出的额外费用已无法收回成本。随着司法管辖区之间的竞争加剧，这种负担将越来越难以忍受。那些拥有盈利能力和资本来应对信息时代竞争挑战的人将能够在任何地方定居和经商。在选择居住地的情况下，只有最爱国或最愚蠢的人才会继续居住在高税率国家。

The wealthy OECD countries impose heavy tax and regulatory burdens upon individuals doing business within their borders. These costs may have been tolerable when the OECD nation-states were the only jurisdictions in which one could do business and reside at a reasonable level of comfort. That day has passed. The premium paid to be taxed and regulated as a resident of the richest nation-states no longer repays its cost. It will be ever less tolerable as competition between jurisdictions intensifies. Those with the earnings ability and capital to meet the competitive challenges of the Information Age will be able to locate anywhere and do business anywhere. With a choice of domiciles, only the most patriotic or stupid will continue to reside in high-tax countries.

因此，可以预见，一个或多个民族国家将采取秘密行动，以破坏短暂生活的吸引力。生物战（例如致命流行病的爆发）可能会有效地阻止旅行。这不仅会打消人们旅行的欲望，还会给全球各地的司法管辖区提供封锁边境和限制移民的借口。

For this reason, it is to be expected that one or more nation-states will undertake covert action to subvert the appeal of transience. Travel could be effectively discouraged by biological warfare, such as the outbreak of a deadly epidemic. This could not only discourage the desire to travel, it could also give jurisdictions throughout the globe an excuse to seal their borders and limit immigration.

国籍税的弊端

The Drawback of Nationality Taxation

除非政策发生惊人的、近乎奇迹般的变化，否则信息时代的成功投资者或企业家将付出数千万、数亿甚至数十亿美元的终生罚款，才能居住在拥有二十世纪最高生活水平财政政策的国家。

Unless there is an astonishing and almost miraculous change in policies, the successful investor or entrepreneur in the Information Age will pay a lifetime penalty of tens of millions, hundreds of millions, or even billions of dollars to reside in the countries with fiscal policies like those that have enjoyed the highest living standards during the twentieth century.

如果不进行彻底的改革，美国人将面临最高的惩罚。美国是全球仅有的三个以国籍而非居住地为依据征税的国家之一。另外两个国家是前美国殖民地菲律宾和厄立特里亚，厄立特里亚的一位流亡领导人在长期反抗埃塞俄比亚统治期间曾受到美国国税局的制裁。厄立特里亚目前征收 3% 的国籍税。虽然这与美国税率相差甚远，但即便是这样的负担也使厄立特里亚公民身份在信息时代成为一种负担。现行法律使美国公民身份成为更大的负担。美国国税局已成为美国的主要出口产品之一。与任何其他国家相比，美国都更愿意将触角伸向地球的各个角落，从其国民身上榨取收入。

Absent a radical change, the penalty will be highest for Americans. The United States is one of just three jurisdictions on the planet that impose taxes based upon nationality rather than residence. The other two are the Philippines, a former U.S. colony, and Eritrea, one of whose exiled leaders fell under the spell of the IRS during its long rebellion against Ethiopian rule. Eritrea now imposes a nationality tax of 3 percent. While that is a pale imitation of the U.S. rates, even that burden makes Eritrean citizenship a liability in the Information Age. Current law makes U.S. citizenship even a larger liability. The IRS has become one of America’s leading exports. More than any other country, the United States reaches to the corners of the earth to extract income from its nationals.

如果一架 747 喷气式客机载着来自地球上每个司法管辖区的一名投资者降落在一个新独立的国家，并且每位投资者在新经济的初创企业中冒着 1,000 美元的风险，那么美国人将面临比其他任何人都高得多的税收。对外国投资征收特殊的惩罚性税收，例如所谓的 PFIC 税，加上美国国籍税，可能导致在美国境外持有的长期资产的纳税义务达到 200% 或更高。作为全球 280 多个其他司法管辖区的公民，成功的美国人可以减少其一生的总纳税负担。

If a 747 jetliner filled with one investor from each jurisdiction on earth touched down in a newly independent country, and each investor risked $1,000 in a start-up venture in the new economy, the American would face a far higher tax than anyone else on any gains. Special, penal taxation of foreign investment, exemplified by the so-called PFIC taxation, plus the U.S. nationality tax, can result in tax liabilities of 200 percent or more on longterm assets held outside the United States. A successful American could reduce his total lifetime tax burden as a citizen of any of more than 280 other jurisdictions on the globe.

美国拥有全球最掠夺性、最富人化的税收制度。与其他国家公民相比，居住在美国或国外的美国人更像是资产，而不是客户。因此，与以高税负著称的斯堪的纳维亚福利国家的税收制度相比，美国的税收制度更不合时宜，也更不适合信息时代的成功。丹麦或瑞典公民在实现个人技术自主权方面几乎没有遇到任何法律障碍。如果他们希望协商自己的税率，他们可以自由选择通过私人协议在瑞士纳税，或者搬到百慕大，根本不缴纳所得税。如果瑞典人或丹麦人认为斯堪的纳维亚福利国家物有所值，因此希望缴纳高额税收，这实际上是在做出选择。他可以选择按照文明或不文明世界任何其他司法管辖区的税率纳税。要改变税率，他只需搬家。技术让这种选择变得更容易。然而，美国人却没有这种选择。

The United States has the globe’s most predatory, soak-the-rich tax system. Americans living in the United States or abroad are treated more like assets and less like customers than citizens of any other country. The American tax regime is therefore more anachronistic and less compatible with success in the Information Age than those of even the notoriously high-tax welfare states of Scandinavia. Citizens of Denmark or Sweden face few legal obstacles in realizing their growing technological autonomy as individuals. Should they wish to negotiate their own tax rates, they are free to elect to pay taxes in Switzerland by private treaty, or move to Bermuda and pay no income taxes at all. A Swede or a Dane who wishes to pay high taxes because he believes the Scandavian welfare state is worth what it costs is actually making a choice. He can elect to be taxed at any rate that prevails in any other jurisdiction in the civilized or uncivilized world. To change his tax rate, he need only move. Technology makes such a choice easier by the moment. Yet that option is denied to Americans.

持有美国护照注定会成为实现信息革命带来的个人自主机会的一大障碍。在工业化时代出生为美国人是一种幸运的意外。即使在信息时代的早期，这也已成为一项价值数百万美元的负担。

Holding a U.S. passport is destined to become a major drawback to realizing the opportunities for individual autonomy made possible by the Information Revolution. Being born an American during the industrial period was a lucky accident. Even in the early stages of the Information Age, it has become a multimillion-dollar liability.

要了解这项责任有多大，请考虑以下比较。在合理的假设下，如果新西兰人的税前收入与美国前 1% 纳税人的平均水平相同，那么他缴纳的税款将少得多，仅凭他的税收储蓄的复合增长，他就比美国人更富有。在有生之年，新西兰人将有 7300 万美元留给他的子孙后代。而且新西兰甚至不是公认的避税天堂。有 40 多个其他司法管辖区征收的收入和资本税低于新西兰。如果我们的论点是正确的，低税管辖区的数量可能会增加而不是减少。所有这些管辖区都将提供比美国更好的居住优势，在一生中价值数千万甚至数亿美元。除非美国税收改革，使其与其他司法管辖区的税收更具竞争力，并且不再以国籍为基础征税，否则有思想的人将放弃美国公民身份，尽管克林顿的退出税设置了障碍。

To see how great a liability, consider this comparison. Under reasonable assumptions, a New Zealander with the same pretax performance as the average of the top 1 percent of American taxpayers would pay so much less in taxes that the compounding of his tax savings alone would make him richer than the American would ever be. At the end of a lifetime, the New Zealander would have $73 million more to leave to his children or grandchildren. And New Zealand is not even a recognized tax haven. More than forty other jurisdictions impose lower income and capital taxation than New Zealand. If our argument is right, the number of low-tax jurisdictions is likely to rise rather than fall. All of them will provide an advantage as a domicile over the United States, worth tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions, over a lifetime. Unless U.S. taxes are reformed to become more competitive with those of other jurisdictions, and are no longer levied on the basis of nationality, thinking persons will renounce U.S. citizenship, notwithstanding the obstacles imposed by Clinton’s exit tax.

信息时代的竞争条件将使人们几乎可以在任何地方获得高收入。实际上，民族国家利用来征收极高税收的地域垄断将被技术打破。它们已经在瓦解。随着它们进一步瓦解，竞争压力几乎必然会驱使最有进取心和能力的人逃离税收过高的国家。正如前《经济学人》编辑诺​​曼·麦克雷所说，这些国家“将主要由傻瓜居住”。

The competitive conditions of the Information Age will render it possible to earn high incomes almost anywhere. In effect, the locational monopolies that nation-states exploited to impose extremely high taxes will be broken by technology. They are already breaking down. As they erode further, competitive pressures are almost bound to drive the most enterprising and able to flee countries that tax too much. As former Economist editor Norman Macrae put it, such countries “will be inhabited residually, mainly by dummies.”

“到 2012 年，预计的福利支出和国家债务利息将耗尽联邦政府征收的所有税收收入。 ……将不会剩下一分钱用于教育、儿童项目、高速公路、国防或任何其他可自由支配的项目。”

—美国两党福利和税收改革委员会​​

“[B]y the year 2012, projected outlays for entitlements and interest on the national debt will consume all tax revenues collected by the federal government. … There will not be one cent left over for education, children’s programs, highways, national defense, or any other discretionary program.”

—BIPARTISAN U.S. COMMISSION ON ENTITLEMENT AND TAX REFORM

从人口统计学角度看，富人逃离发达福利国家的时间恰好不对。21 世纪初期，欧洲和北美大量老龄人口将发现自己没有足够的储蓄来支付医疗费用并维持其生活方式。退休。例如，65% 的美国人根本没有退休储蓄。一点儿也没有。而那些有储蓄的人储蓄的也太少了。普通美国人在 65 岁时，在去世前将面临超过 20 万美元的预期医疗费用，而净资产不到 7.5 万美元。即使是少数拥有私人养老金的人也不太可能过得舒服。平均养老金只能替代退休前收入的 20%。典型退休人员的大部分资产不是真正的财富，而是“超验资本”，即转移支付的预期价值。大多数人已经习惯于依靠这些转移支付来弥补私人资源的缺口。问题是，这些转移支付不太可能到位。现收现付制将缺乏现金流或资源来弥补这些缺口。尼尔·豪的一项研究表明，即使美国税前收入的增长速度比过去20年更快，到2040年，美国的平均税后收入也必须下降59%，才能维持现有水平的社会保障和政府医疗项目。

The flight of the wealthy from advanced welfare states will happen at just the wrong time demographically. Early in the twenty-first century, large aging populations in Europe and North America will find themselves with insufficient savings to meet medical expenses and finance their lifestyles in retirement. For example, fully 65 percent of Americans have no savings for retirement at all. None. And those who do save save far too little. The average American will reach sixty-five facing expected medical bills of more than $200,000 before death and with a net worth of less than $75,000. Even the minority with private pensions are unlikely to be comfortable. The average pension will replace only 20 percent of preretirement income. Most of the assets of the typical retiree are not real wealth but “transcendental capital,” the expected value of transfer payments. Most people have been conditioned to rely upon these transfer payments to make up the gap in their private resources. The catch is that they are unlikely to be forthcoming. Pay-as-you-go systems will lack the cash flow or resources to make good on them. A study conducted by Neil Howe showed that even if pretax incomes in the United States were to rise faster than they have over the past twenty years, average after-tax incomes in America would have to be pushed down by 59 percent by 2040 in order to finance Social Security and government medical programs at current levels.

这不是可以小范围操纵的问题。福利国家面临破产。其融资困境在欧洲比在北美更为严重。意大利可能是最糟糕的例子，紧随其后的是瑞典和其他北欧福利国家，这些国家为收入支持计划设定了慷慨的条件。《金融时报》估计，“如果包括意大利国家养老金的现值，该国公共部门债务将上升至 GDP 的 200% 以上。” ⁹¹

This is not a problem that can be manipulated around the margins. The welfare state faces insolvency. Its financing predicament is even more acute in Europe than in North America. Italy is perhaps the worst case, followed closely by Sweden and the other Nordic welfare states that set the standard for generous terms in income-support programs. The Financial Times estimates that if “the present value of Italian state pensions is included, the country’s public sector debt would rise to more than 200 percent of GDP.”⁹¹

^从数学角度看，如此高额的债务几乎是无望的。几年前对多伦多证券交易所公司商业债务进行的一项全面研究表明，很少有公司能够承受目前主要福利国家所面临的债务比率四分之一的极端情况。92简而言之，他们破产了。面对这一现实，尽管不情愿但不可避免，数万亿美元的无资金保障权益将被注销。

Indebtedness at such levels is all but mathematically hopeless. A comprehensive study of commercial indebtedness of Toronto Stock Exchange companies undertaken a few years ago showed that few survive debt ratios one-quarter as extreme as those facing the leading welfare states today.⁹² Put simply, they are broke. As this reality is faced, grudgingly but inevitably, literally trillions in unfunded entitlement obligations will be written off.

这就是网络经济的逻辑。一个可能的障碍可能是简单的惰性，即筑巢的本能，它使人类不愿意拿起木桩搬家。如果还有其他障碍，它们可能是人类天性中固有的。在网络空间部署资产的经济逻辑可能与生物学上对外界根深蒂固的怀疑相悖。每种文化中的儿童都对陌生人表现出厌恶。主权商业化的反对者将竭尽全力煽动人们对信息时代的新全球文化及其所暗示的民族国家的消亡的怀疑。另一个可能来自表观遗传或受基因影响的动机因素的障碍是，“失败者和被遗弃者”将以狩猎采集者保护家庭的愤怒来应对破坏民族国家的发展。在一个迷失方向和疏远的个人将拥有更大的权力来保护他们的家庭的环境中，扰乱和破坏，对信息经济的反弹可能是暴力的和令人不快的。

Such is the logic of the cybereconomy. One possible hitch may be simple inertia, the nesting instinct that makes humans reluctant to pick up stakes and move. If there are other hitches, they may be hardwired into human nature. The economic logic of deploying assets in cyberspace could run counter to the biologic expressed in the ingrained suspicions of outsiders. Children in every culture show an aversion to strangers. Opponents of the commercialization of sovereignty will do their best to inflame doubts about the new global culture of the Information Age and the demise of the nation-state that it implies. Another possible hitch arising from epigenesis, or genetically influenced motivational factors, is the prospect that the “losers and left-behinds” will respond to developments that undermine the nation-state with the fury of hunter-gatherers protecting their families. In an environment where disoriented and alienated individuals will have increased power to disrupt and destroy, a backlash against the information economy could prove to be violent and unpleasant.

“从历史上看，西方国家的核心政治进程中经常出现集体暴力。寻求夺取、控制或重新调整权力杠杆的人们不断将集体暴力作为斗争的一部分。被压迫者以正义的名义发动攻击，特权阶层以秩序的名义发动攻击，中间人则以恐惧的名义发动攻击。权力安排的巨大转变通常会产生——并且往往依赖于——集体暴力的特殊时刻。” ⁹³

—查尔斯·蒂利

“Historically, collective violence has flowed regularly out of the central political processes of Western countries. People seeking to seize, hold, or realign the levers of power have continually engaged in collective violence as part of their struggles. The oppressed have struck in the name of justice, the privileged in the name of order, those between in the name of fear. Great shifts in the arrangements of power have ordinarily produced—and have often depended on—exceptional moments of collective violence.”⁹³

—CHARLES TILLY

暴力视角​​

VIOLENCE IN PERSPECTIVE

关于在变革条件下什么会引发暴力，至少有两种相互竞争的理论。历史学家查尔斯·蒂利总结了一种理论：“集体暴力的刺激主要来自于人们在既定制度崩溃时所经历的焦虑。如果痛苦或危险加剧了焦虑，那么反应就会变得更加暴力。”然而，在蒂利看来，暴力与其说是“焦虑”的产物，不如说是一种更为理性的企图，目的是胁迫当局“履行职责”，其动机是“正义感被剥夺”。根据蒂利的解释，“大规模的结构性变化”往往会刺激“政治”性质的集体暴力。“暴力斗争不会与‘正常’政治生活形成鲜明对比，而且，暴力斗争往往伴随着、补充和扩展了同一群人为实现目标而进行的有组织的和平努力。它们与非暴力斗争属于同一个世界。” ⁹⁴

There are at least two contending theories about what precipitates violence in conditions of change. Historian Charles Tilly summarizes one theory: “[T]he stimulus to collective violence comes largely from the anxieties people experience when established institutions fall apart. If misery or danger compounds the anxiety, runs the theory, the reaction becomes all the more violent.” In Tilly’s view, however, violence is not so much a product of “anxiety” as it is a far more rational attempt to bully authorities into “meeting their responsibilities” motivated by a “sense of justice denied.” According to Tilly’s interpretation, “large structural changes” tend to stimulate collective violence of a “political” nature. “Instead of constituting a sharp break from ‘normal’ political life, furthermore, violent struggles tend to accompany, complement, and extend organized, peaceful attempts by the same people to accomplish their objectives. They belong to the same world as nonviolent contention.”⁹⁴

无论哪种暴力理论更为正确，大转型时期社会和平的前景似乎都是有限的。民族国家的崩溃无疑是“既定制度崩溃”的一个显著例子。因此，焦虑情绪可能会全面爆发，暴力的政治动机也将如此。在领先的福利国家，情况可能尤其如此，因为那里的民众已经习惯了相对的收入平等。鉴于信息经济早期阶段的民众将在工业化时期成长，当时政治当局确实有能力用物质利益来回应不满，因此可以合理地预期“落后者”将继续要求物质利益。他们可能需要在现实中经历缓慢而痛苦的教训。在经合组织民众不再期望能够大规模强制收入再分配之前，网络经济是可行的。无论哪种情况，无论暴力是出于“焦虑”，还是为了利用系统强制的好处而采取的更有计划的努力，情况似乎都使暴力有可能发生。

Whichever theory of violence is more correct, prospects for social peace during the Great Transformation would appear to be limited. The collapse of the nation-state surely counts as a conspicuous example of an “established institution falling apart.” Therefore, anxieties are likely to be in full flower, as will the political inspiration for violence. This could be especially true in the leading welfare states, where populations are accustomed to relative income equality. Given that populations in the early stages of the information economy will have come of age during the industrial period, when political authorities did have the capacity to answer grievances with material benefits, it is reasonable to expect the “left-behinds” to continue to demand material benefits. It will probably take a slow, painful tutorial in the realities of the cybereconomy before OECD populations are weaned away from expectations of being able to compel income redistribution on a large scale. In either case, whether violence arises from “anxiety” or as a more calculating effort to harness the benefits of systematic compulsion, conditions would appear to make violence likely.

失败者选区

Constituencies of Losers

强制收入再分配制度的崩溃必定会让那些期望成为数万亿美元转移计划受益者的人感到不安。这些人大多是“失败者或被遗弃者”，没有在全球市场竞争的技能。就像前苏联的退休老人一样，他们是祖加诺夫共产党支持的核心，垂死福利国家的失望退休老人将形成一个反动选民群体，他们热衷于阻止民族国家的主权被私有化，从而剥夺国家偷窃的许可证。当他们意识到他们以前控制的政府正在失去对资源的主权和强制大规模收入转移的能力时，他们将变得像法国公务员一样坚决反对算术。

The collapse of coerced income redistribution is bound to upset those who expect to be on the receiving end of the trillions in transfer programs. Mostly, these will be “the losers or left-behinds,” persons without the skills to compete in global markets. Like the pensioners of the former Soviet Union who formed the core of Zuganov’s Communist support, the disappointed pensioners of the dying welfare states will form a reactionary constituency keen to prevent the sovereignty of the nation-states from being privatized, thereby depriving the state of its license to steal. As they realize that governments they formerly controlled are losing their sovereignty over resources and the ability to compel large-scale income transfers, they will become as adamant as French civil servants in fighting arithmetic.

您可能还记得，总理阿兰·朱佩 (Alain Juppe) 提出了一个相当温和的建议，即削减“人口统计学上不可持续的”国家工作人员退休福利，并节约国有铁路系统的运营，这一建议引起了激烈的反应。象征着“国家天意” (État-Providence)（法国人称其社会福利制度）荒谬性的规则是允许“电脑高速 TGV 列车上的工程师在 50 岁时退休，就像他们的前辈在燃煤机车上辛勤工作一样……” ⁹⁵任何经合组织国家都可能对削减不可持续的福利做出激烈反应。即使在民众反应不那么愤怒的地方，你也可以预料到，可能的失败者会尽其所能阻止国家强制力的削弱。

You may remember the violent reaction that greeted Prime Minister Alain Juppe’s quite modest proposals to scale back “demographically unsustainable” retirement benefits of state workers and economize the operations of the nationalized railroad system. Symbolic of the absurdity of the État-Providence, as the French call their social welfare system, is the rule that allows “engineers on the computerized, high-speed TGV trains to retire at age fifty, just like their predecessors who toiled on the coal-fired locomotives.…”⁹⁵ A rowdy reaction to cutbacks of unsustainable benefits is a distinct possibility in any OECD country. And even where populations respond less angrily, you can expect the probable losers to do whatever is within their power to forestall the erosion of state compulsion.

这将导致一些令人惊讶的转折。例如，在美国，本土主义情绪在历史上一直带有种族主义的色彩。这一传统始于 19 世纪的“白帽党”和三 K 党。然而，作为一个群体，黑人是收入转移、平权行动和其他政治强制成果的主要受益者。他们在美国军队中的比例也很高。因此，他们很可能与蓝领白人一起成为美国民族主义最狂热的拥护者。

This will lead to some surprising twists. In the United States, for example, nativist sentiment has historically been tinged with more than a slight tincture of racism. This is a tradition that began with the nineteenth-century “White Caps” and Ku Klux Klan. Yet blacks, as a group, are major beneficiaries of income transfers, affirmative action, and other fruits of political compulsion. They are also disproportionately represented in the U.S. military. Therefore, they are likely to emerge, along with blue-collar whites, as among the most fervent partisans of American nationalism.

几乎每个国家，那些愿意迎合那些才华横溢的不安全感的政客都会脱颖而出。从塞尔维亚的斯洛博丹·米洛舍维奇到美国的帕特·布坎南，再到新西兰的温斯顿·彼得斯，再到土耳其的内杰梅丁·埃尔巴坎。原教旨主义伊斯兰福利党的煽动者会大肆反对市场全球化、移民和投资自由。

Politicians willing to cater to the insecurities of those whose relative talents fall well down on Ammon’s turnip will come noisily to the fore in almost every country. From Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia to Pat Buchanan in the United States to Winston Peters in New Zealand, to Necmettin Erbakan of Turkey’s fundamentalist Islamic Welfare Party, demagogues will rail against the globalization of markets, immigration, and freedom of investment.

那些认为自己是“全球经济的牺牲品”的人会特别仇视富人和移民。用安德鲁·希尔的话来说，他们会“鄙视那些主要准入标准似乎是财富——或者缺乏财富——的移民，按照似是而非的逻辑，这让他们成为福利的负担。” ⁹⁶

Particular animus will be directed toward the rich and immigrants by those who imagine themselves to be the “global economy’s casualties.” In the words of Andrew Heal, they will “depise the entry of immigrants whose main entry criterion appears to be their wealth—or their lack of it, which, the specious logic goes, makes them welfare burdens.”⁹⁶

对自由的恐惧

Fear of Freedom

在新千年之初，民族国家消失的前景似乎恰逢其时，将对易受影响的人们的生活造成最大程度的干扰。这将导致普遍的不愉快。不少观察家已经认识到，那些因无国界世界前景而感到被排斥的人普遍存在一种反应模式。随着更大、更具包容性的民族群体开始瓦解，随着流动性更强的“信息精英”将他们的事务全球化，“失败者和被遗弃者”又回到了某个族群、部落、帮派、宗教或语言少数群体的身份。在一定程度上，这是对以前由国家提供的服务（包括法律和秩序）崩溃的一种实际而务实的反应。对于几乎没有可销售资源的人来说，购买失败的公共服务的市场替代品往往很困难。

The prospect of the disappearance of the nation-state early in the new millennium seems timed to effect the maximum disruption in the lives of suggestible people. This will lead to widespread unpleasantness. More than a few observers have recognized a pattern of reaction that is common among those who feel left out by the prospect of a borderless world. As the larger, more inclusive national grouping begins to break down, with the more mobile “information elite” globalizing their affairs, the “losers and left-behinds” fall back upon membership in an ethnic subgroup, a tribe, a gang, a religious or linguistic minority. Partly, this is a practical and pragmatic reaction to the collapse of services, including law and order, formerly provided by the state. For persons with few marketable resources, it often proves difficult to purchase access to market alternatives to failed public services.

对于那些拥有足够资源购买高质量私人替代品的人来说，将教育、清洁水供应和社区治安等以前被视为公共物品的物品转变为私人物品显然更容易管理。然而，对于那些想要现金的人来说，最实际的选择往往是依靠亲属，或加入按种族组织起来的互助团体，如东南亚古老的华人“福建人”，或通过宗教集会。在世界上那些活跃的、传教性宗教活跃的地区，他们的计划之所以受欢迎，部分原因在于他们倾向于回归提供社会福利和公共物品的前现代机制。例如，穆斯林领导的治安团体在南非开普敦打击暴力团伙方面发挥了主导作用。97^但尽管这种种族和宗教援助组织可能很实际和务实，但它更多地涉及对国家衰落的反动反应。在对全球化的反应中似乎也有一个强大的心理因素。

The transformation of what were formerly treated as public goods, such as education, provision of clean water, and neighborhood policing, into private goods is obviously easier to manage for those with sufficient resources to purchase high-quality private alternatives. For those wanting cash, however, the most practical alternative is often to depend upon kin, or join a mutual-aid group organized along ethnic lines, like the old ethnic Chinese “Hokkien” of Southeast Asia, or through a religious congregation. In those parts of the world where dynamic, proselytizing religions are active, part of the popularity of their programs depends on the fact that they tend to hark back to premodern mechanisms for providing social welfare and public goods. For example, Moslem-led vigilante groups have played a leading role in combating violent gangs in Cape Town, South Africa.⁹⁷ But as practical and pragmatic as such ethnic and religious organization of help can be, more is involved in the reactionary response to the withering of the state. There also seems to be a strong psychological component in the reaction against globalization.

这一论点与埃里希·弗洛姆在其1941 年首次出版的著名著作《逃避自由》中对法西斯主义吸引力的心理学解释并无不同^。98根据弗洛姆的说法，社会流动性资本主义带来的社会变革摧毁了传统乡村生活的固定身份。农民的儿子不再知道自己终将成为一名农民，甚至不知道自己注定要在父亲耕种的贫瘠土地上辛苦劳作以求得收成。他现在有了一个广泛的职业选择。他可以成为一名教师、商人、士兵；学习医学或出海。即使作为一名农民，他也可以移民到美国、加拿大或阿根廷，远离祖先的家乡生活。资本主义为人们提供的这种“创造自己身份”的自由，对于那些不准备创造性地利用它的人来说是可怕的。正如比利格所说，他们渴望“坚实身份带来的安全感”，并“被民族主义和法西斯主义宣传的简单性所吸引”，⁹⁹同样，正如比利格在工业时代黄昏时期所写的那样，“有一种全球心理，它从上而下打击国家，用自由的身份认同削弱忠诚度。然后，还有种姓或部落的狂热心理，它以强烈的不宽容承诺和情感上的凶猛打击国家的软肋。” ¹⁰⁰

The argument is not dissimilar to the psychological explanation for the appeal of fascism developed by Erich Fromm in his famous work Escape from Freedom, first published in 1941.⁹⁸ According to Fromm, social mobility introduced by capitalism had destroyed the fixed identities of traditional village life. The son of a farmer no longer knew that he would inevitably be a farmer, or even that he would be bound to live scrabbling to harvest a crop on the same poor ground that his father tilled. He now had a broad choice of occupation. He could become a schoolteacher, a merchant, a soldier; study medicine or take to the sea. Even as a farmer, he could emigrate to the United States, Canada, or Argentina and make a life far from the home of his forebears. This freedom that capitalism provided to people “to create their own identities” proved scary to those who were not prepared to make creative use of it. As Billig said, they yearned “for the security of a solid identity,” and were “drawn towards the simplicities of nationalist and fascist propaganda,”⁹⁹ Equally as Billig writes of the twilight of the industrial era, “There is a global psychology, which strikes the nation from above, withering loyalties with a free play of identities. And then, there is the hot psychology of caste or tribe, which hits at the soft underbelly of the state with a powerfully intolerant commitment and emotional ferocity.”¹⁰⁰

安德鲁·希尔从另一个角度看待同一现象。他认为全球有两大“政治和经济趋势……趋势一是全球经济的增长……第二是民族主义、种族和地区主义情绪的兴起，无论是毛利人、苏格兰人、威尔士人还是反移民派系，即使他们的政府推动他们走向新的、无边界的视野，他们也会竭力将自己拉向相反的方向。” ¹⁰¹不管你选择如何看待它们，无论是作为主要的“趋势”还是“心理主题”，很明显，一种支持民族主义、反对边界崩溃和市场深化的强烈反动情绪正在全球范围内聚集。

Andrew Heal views the same phenomenon from another perspective. He sees two great “global political and economic trends.… Trend one is the growth of the global economy.… The second is the rise of nationalist, ethnic and regionalist sentiment, whether it be Maori, Scottish, Welsh or from anti-immigrant factions, who even as their governments push them towards new, borderless horizons, pull themselves ever so hard the opposite way.”¹⁰¹ However you choose to look at them, whether as major “trends” or “psychological themes,” it is clear that a strong reactionary sentiment in favor of nationalism and against the fall of borders and the deepening of markets is gathering its voice worldwide.

多元文化主义与受害